Author: John Conroe
Date: 2012-01-14T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Vampires; Fantasy
Description: Book 4 of the Demon Accords. Chris and Tanya have been assigned as Coven Rovers, travelling the country and troubleshooting the supernatural community. It's a job that's part cop and part auditor, one that should be long periods of boredom mixed with small parts of action. But this is Chris and Tanya, so a sudden assignment to check on a rogue vampire leads to a run-in with a hostile master vampire, a hit squad, monsters straight out of Native American folklore, black ops teams, and, worst of all, vampire politics. Now more than ever, Chris must control his dark side, as the alternative is dea
Publisher: Holme Press

Duel Nature

A Novel of the Demon Accords

By John Conroe

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2012 John Conroe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by John Conroe

The Demon Accord Series:

God Touched

Demon Driven

Brutal Asset

Duel Nature

Black Frost

Chapter 1

The drops of rain had fallen thousands of feet, gathering speed and size before they smashed into the ground. Some, the very biggest, were smashing into the back of my head. Those particular drops were also, I’m pretty sure, the coldest.

The freezing spring downpour had been sheeting past us for twenty minutes, the only real activity around us during our stakeout. Only slightly interesting, but very annoying.

“Stop that! You’re being a wussy about this. You don’t even get cold anymore,” my partner said.

I hadn’t said a word, but the slim, black-haired and black- clad figure kneeling next to me could still read my inner whining like I had shouted it out loud.

“I don’t like sitting in the rain. Never have,” I replied, glancing sideways at Tanya. That was a mistake because my eyes found her beautiful features infinitely more interesting than the rainy night.

She sighed and glanced back at me, electric blue eyes glowing in the dark. “Focus, Chris. The rogue may be here soon and we don’t want to miss him,” she said, pointing one slim muscled arm down the side of the building to the bar entrance twenty-three floors below.

That was the other weird thing about our stakeout. We were kneeling on the side of an apartment building, using Darkkin energy techniques to Cling to the side, little pitons of quantum energy holding us in place. It was definitely weird, even if it was more comfortable than standing on the roof and leaning over the edge.

Two years ago I hadn’t been aware that vampires and werewolves (not to mention other weres) existed. I had known all about demons though, as those were something of a specialty of mine. You might even say I had been tapped by God to handle Hell’s children. But then I met Tanya (if by meeting you mean driving away a demon and then feeding her most of my blood supply) and my life had changed. I had changed, drastically. When she gave me a small amount of her unique and potent blood, it had fit my DNA like a glove to a hand. I gained vampire-like abilities and a werewolf’s metabolism. And a life mate.

“There he is!” she whispered, as if the rogue was gonna hear her voice 230 plus feet above him in the middle of a thunderstorm. But that attention to detail was part of what made her an apex predator.

I looked below and spotted the man she was talking about. From above all I could see was dark reddish hair and a green army jacket. But my ability to identify vampires and weres on sight was telling me he was the one we had been waiting for – a new vampire, maybe two weeks old. He was also the one that was most likely responsible for a two week spate of recent murders.

“Okay. I’ll go round him up. See you out back,” I replied, standing up on the side of the building. Or maybe standing out is a better term. I don’t know – this whole climbing walls like Spiderman is still pretty new. Tanya has done it her whole life, but I’ve only been at it a couple of years now.

I released my Cling, my body immediately pulled down by gravity, free falling down the side of the building. Wind tugged at my clothing as the ground rushed up faster and faster. Forty feet above the ground, I Pulled my feet back to the wall, running as soon as my feet touched the bricks. Then I gradually slowed to a walk and finally, stepped smoothly off the side of the building onto level ground. Bizarre -- but really, really cool.

Puddles splashed around my boots, darkening my jeans with wet splotches. I had actually stayed pretty dry during our watch. My long waxed Aussie drover-style duster had kept most of the rain from my clothes; just the drops that had hit my head and neck had gotten past its protection. My normal body temperature of 103 degrees had shrugged off the cold.

I still didn’t like sitting in the rain…too many hours spent on deer watch in freezing Adirondack weather while I was growing up; waiting to shoot deer that I really hadn’t wanted to kill, but that my grandfather insisted we needed for the freezer.

No one noticed my sudden appearance, mostly because no one was stupid enough to stand in the rain outside the sports bar housed in the ground floor of the apartment building. A glance up showed an empty building side. Inside was dry and noisy. It was one of those casual neighborhood places that are great for hanging out and watching a Monday night football game or just meeting friends after work. It seemed pretty busy for a Wednesday night, a mix of mostly young people, and slightly more guys than girls. The thirty foot bar was fully occupied and about two-thirds of the tables had occupants, sipping drinks, laughing and watching the ten or twelve flatscreens mounted around the place.

I scanned the room as I approached the bar, shaking the rain off the drover coat. Two sweeps of the place and I had found my guy, standing back in a dark corner, holding a beer and watching the rest of the pub’s customers with predatory eyes.

A direct approach would either lead to a very short, very graphic fight (with blood-spattered walls and equally blood-spattered customers) or him bolting from the pub too early, so instead I decided to hang at the bar. Four big ceiling fans were swirling the warm air around the room and very shortly my scent would reach him. Then his attention would lock on to me. That was pretty much a given, as my AB positive blood mixed with whatever pheromones the V-squared virus had fostered inside me was pretty much an irresistible combination for hungry vampires. Like Taco Bell for teenage boys.

Unfortunately, the same virus that had left me smelling good to vampires had made me look good to humans, so I was starting to attract attention on my way to the beer tap bristling bar. Two of the young waitresses watched me as I wove between tables and several of the seated customers, not all of them female, tried to catch my eye.

Ignoring the glances in my direction, I found a gap between stools and waited for the bartender’s attention, using the moment to keep track of my quarry. He had been watching two couples playing a half-hearted game of pool, but I just about felt the moment his gaze shifted to me.

“What can I get you?” the brunette bartender asked. Meeting her eyes, which widened at the sight of my violet irises, I tried to keep my peripheral vision on the rogue.

“Smithwick’s if you have it.” Might as well enjoy the role I was playing.

“Sure,” she said, taking a second to pull her gaze away from my strange peepers, then grabbing a pint glass from the rack behind her.

The rogue had shifted position slightly, his stance oriented in my direction now. Perfect.

“Nice coat,” the bartender said with a smirk as she slid the frothy beer my way.

“Gift from a friend. She meant it as a joke, but I ended up liking it. It really works well on a night like this,” I replied.

That was actually true. When Tanya and I had been selected to work as Coven Rovers I had made a stupid comment in front of Lydia, Tanya’s best friend and de facto sister. It was one of those mental lapses that hit many people from time to time and me painfully often. I think I said something about heading west to be a ‘cattle rover’ and the spikey haired little vampire had burst out laughing. She finally caught her breath and said, “It’s ‘cattle drover’, not rover. Dumbass!” No matter how deferentially other vampires and weres treat me, I can always count on Lydia to bring me back to solid ground.

A week later the coat had shown up in our quarters, wrapped in brown paper with a cow bell on the outside. However, when I tried it on it had fit perfectly and Tanya had liked the look, so I kept it.

“Gift from your girlfriend?” the bartender asked, ignoring the guy three places down who was holding his empty glass in her direction.

“Girlfriend’s sister,” I said, wondering why that was important.

She nodded once, gave me a smile and then after a pause, went to fill the man’s glass. I drank a third of the pint in one swallow, followed it with another third and then finished the glass, making a production of smacking my lips.

“That tasted like another!” I said to the bartender’s surprised expression.

“Whoa! Someone’s thirsty tonight!” she said, giving me a bemused smile. She refilled the glass and then took the twenty dollar bill I left on the bar. I polished off half of the second beer while she was getting my change, earning myself a cautionary look from her and smirks from the trio of nerdy guys sitting next to me.

“Easy there cowboy, you don’t have to rush. We’re not running out of Smithwick’s anytime soon,” the bartender said, her reappraisal of me starting to come up negative.

“First beer of the night?” one of the geeks asked. They had been discussing hadron colliders or something when I arrived.

“Well, first beer here, anyway!” I said with a laugh. The rogue was completely locked onto me and I knew he could hear my words even from across the noisy room. I polished off the second beer, then asked the science types where the men’s room was. They pointed in the direction of the rogue’s corner and I headed over, adding a slight weave to my walk.

Behind me I could hear the bartender talking to one of the waitresses. “- first interesting guy in a month and he drinks like a frat boy!” she said.

“I don’t care. If he’s tipsy maybe he’ll forget about that girlfriend he mentioned,” the waitress giggled.

I wasn’t really tipsy. My metabolism eats alcohol way too fast for me to even catch a buzz, and it would be a frosty frozen day in Hell before I’d ever forget Tanya.

Pushing into the men’s room, I moved to a urinal and pretended to take a piss, waiting for the rogue to follow me in.

Right on schedule I heard the door open and a miasma of odor flowed over me. Unwashed body odor mixed with dried, decaying blood. I think I threw up in my mouth a little.

Spinning around, I faced the young vampire up close for the first time. About six feet or so, thin with a whole slew of freckles to go with his red hair. Howdy Dowdy Dracula, in person. Sunglasses covered his eyes, which would be the red that all new vampires have for a time. Comes from all the blood vessels in the eyes that the V-squared breaks during the Turn.

He missed the fact that I hadn’t had to zip up or fix my clothes, his attention on my throat.

“Dude, you absolutely reek!”

He frowned, surprised, but quickly shook it off and pulled back his lips in a fang filled snarl.

I took two steps forward and palm smacked his forehead.

“Stop that!”

He hadn’t been able to react to my speed, a fact that clearly puzzled him. He tried for the intimidating growling fang face thing again. I smacked him again – harder. Bouncing off the wall, his dark glasses knocked askew, he looked truly shaken.

Young vamps are one and a half to two times faster than humans. As they age, vampires get stronger and faster. As they learn to harness whatever Dark energy or quantum particles allow them to manipulate Newton’s physics, old vamps get scary fast.

My Tanya was born into the species, the only vampire of her kind. At only twenty-four she was as fast as the Elders who ran the Covens. I, even new to the virus as I am, am much faster than most vampires. I’m not really a vampire, but some odd hybrid, as unique as Tanya, in my own way. I’m usually nowhere near as fast as Tanya, but I was much quicker than Howdy. The only time that I am as fast as my vampire princess is when Grim comes out to play.

So carrot head was justifiably shocked when I knocked him on his ass. Prey wasn’t supposed to do that.

There had been three murders that fit a vampire attack profile in the last two weeks. Coven computers had picked up the news article on the first attack, flagging it for a set of eyes to review. The second attack had come just two days later and the analyst had assigned it a high priority. Lydia contacted us as we were the closest Rover team to Chicago. We had been finishing an audit in Cincinnati (actually, Tanya had been finishing it, I’m not that patient with numbers and ledgers) and even though we only had three months on the job we got the case. The third murder had occurred the night before we arrived. That made finding the murder scene easy…the police tape was still up. Studying the back alley had resulted in one of my psychic visions, the kind I draw out on paper like a movie director’s story board. The pictures had given us enough detail to build a good likeness of the rogue. Asking around had resulted in a name – Len Corbett, whose friends hadn’t seen him in his usual haunts by daylight, but he had been seen at night. An unguided newly made vampire was just a sack of impulses, the prime one being hunger. Without a mentor he would stay in the area he was most familiar with. He would also draw attention to the supernatural world of vampires and other things that bump in the night, because he would kill his prey in the most graphic of manners.

We had picked this bar as one of his more likely spots to visit. Sure enough he had shown up right on cue. The rest of his story would play out very quickly.

“You’re a mess! You’ve been killing people all over the place, you have no idea how to keep a low profile and you stink! Bad vampire!” I told him. The shock on his face deepened.

“So, we’re – “ I pointed back and forth between us, “gonna go find your maker and see if you can be salvaged, got it?”

His expression turned to panic at the word ‘maker’ and he leapt to his feet, glanced at the door, then me, then jumped through the three foot by two foot window slightly above us.

I sighed as broken glass fell to the bathroom floor, then followed him; my jump being a whole lot more graceful than his.

Chapter 2

Lenny boy had only made it ten feet from the broken window at the back of the building. He was frozen in place, staring at the giant canine form that sat on its haunches another six feet in front of him. At least 250 pounds of wolf watched Len’s every move.

I moved up slowly, so as not to spook him, trying to ignore the pouring rain. The fact that he wasn’t trying to outrun the giant wolf in front of him was a real sign of intelligence. Maybe, just maybe, he could be saved.

“His name is Awasos, and he will catch you if you run,” I said. Part of me hoped he would run. I’m not fond of murderers.

Awasos looked my way and I could swear his left eye winked at me.

He does shit like that all the time. Winks, canine grins, even somehow opens the locked car door and lets himself out when no one is around. He even does it in his other form, the bigger one. Not your average canine. Or ursine.

Ghost quiet, Tanya drifted up next to my furry pal, catching the young vampire’s attention. She locked eyes with him and the tension of the moment evaporated. She has that effect on young vampires. Some part of them recognizes what she is, the purest of vampires, the only vampire ever born to the species. Recognizing a higher level vampire is a survival instinct in young ones. Failure to submit to an older vampire pretty much guarantees that a new born vamp won’t get to be an old vamp.

Like most, Lenny the rogue immediately sensed Tanya’s place in the scheme of things and was her enthralled vassal in a slow second.

“Come with us, Leonard,” she said and he did.

***

I kept my window cracked as we drove to the home of Chicago’s senior vampire. Lenny sat in back of the big Chevy Suburban, Tanya next to me up front, and Awasos was lolling about the open cargo area, which was the only space big enough for him. The rogue still stank and now we had a serious case of wet dog smell floating about the SUV.

Calvin Langsdale, Master of Chicago, had been born in England in the late 1600’s. He was Turned at the age of twenty-nine and immigrated to America in the early 1800’s. Landing in Chicago, he had survived everything the windy city could throw at him, including the gang wars of Prohibition, and evil Al Capone.

His home, which doubled as his headquarters, was in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, where houses routinely sell for five to ten million dollars. Langsdale’s home, according to the Coven file that we had reviewed on the drive from Cincinnati, was originally constructed in 1896, had sixteen rooms total, with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms. Twelve thousand square feet of French Provincial architecture with a dining room table that could seat fourteen. The lot it was on was standard for the area, with almost no land, but Calvin had solved that problem by buying all the properties around it, which cut down on the issue of nosey neighbors.

I pulled to a stop in the semi-circular driveway, then rolled down the window to face the vampire sentry who was suddenly in my face.

“Rover team 29. Langsford here?” I said by way of introduction. The sentry, a big box-headed vampire with long stringy hair and a heavy brow, glanced from me to Tanya, the sneer on his face sliding away even as recognition of my words hit.

He looked in the back seat where Lenny the young rogue waited and finally noted the giant wolfy bulk of Awasos in the back cargo area. Eyes wider, he slid back into the open guard booth that was tucked under the front porch. When he came back forty seconds later with two more vampires, he was slightly more receptive to us, or at least Tanya.

“Langsford will see you inside,” he said, addressing his comments to my vampire. I sighed, mentally preparing myself for what was sure to come next. Tanya patted my leg, then slid gracefully from the big SUV.

I grabbed Lenny from the back seat, then hit the latch release for the back of the Suburban. Awasos jumped down, his 250 pounds landing lightly on the ground. All three Darkkin guards suddenly reevaluated the situation as his size became apparent. Tanya caught my grin, then read me like a book, smiling herself at my thought. If they only knew that’s his smallest shape.

Our odd little group moved up the marble steps to the front doors entering the grand mansion where another five vampires waited. This obvious display of muscle was led by a mean looking bruiser who stood about three inches over six feet and must have weighed as much as Awasos.

“Names?” he asked, dismissing me with a glance and leering at Tanya.

“Christian Gordon, Tatiana Demidova, Coven Rover team 29,” she answered him, not bothering to introduce Lenny or Awasos.

There was no sudden noise, rather a cessation of all noise and movement as the vampires froze. Rover team designations aren’t universally well known, but the Demidova name was huge in the Darkkin world, and Tanya was arguably its biggest celebrity.

After a moment, one of the vampires farthest away, broke his stillness to flash through the door behind him.

“Tom is just going to announce you Miss Demidova,” the leader said, his leer toned down ever so slightly.

Tanya just nodded, settling into a manikin-like stillness of her own. I don’t do well with sitting still, so I continued to look around at the opulent surroundings, noticing the valuable antiques and expensive decorations. Part of me, a part I keep locked down inside, noticed the doorways, windows, camera system, and alarm sensors. It also noted which priceless sculptures and artifacts would make the best weapons. There was a lot of that to choose from, as the mansion was an updated version of the Gilded age lifestyle of the late 1800’s.

When I was seven, my family went on vacation to the ocean. Newport, Rhode Island to be exact, and while we were there we toured the grand mansion, Breakers, which was built by a Vanderbilt in the 1890’s as a summer cottage. Huge, and ostentatious, Breakers has rooms literally plated in gold and platinum. Langsford’s place reminded me of that.

Ornate carved marble and wood trim, ceilings eighteen feet high, priceless antiques and works of art, it was all intended to be overwhelming. The fact that I wasn’t overwhelmed was a testament to my last two years with Tanya and her mother, whose wealth dwarfed Langsford’s.

The vampire, Tom, came back in. “Master Langsford will see you now. The wolf stays out here, though.”

I glanced at Awasos, who heaved a canine sigh and promptly lay down, facing Tom and the door we went through.

Langsford’s office was done, or maybe overdone, in the dark wooded English library format, which was appropriate as he was, after all, English.

Seated behind a large ornate cherry desk that held pride of place in front of an immense stone fireplace, Langsford looked up as we entered. Eleven other vampires occupied various parts of the office, some standing near the Master of Chicago, while others lounged indolently in the oversized chairs and chaises. A cut crystal glass of brandy or whiskey sat near his hand, the matching crystal decanter standing at the desk corner.

Being as it was the middle of his business 'day', Langsford was appropriately attired in a tailored suit of dark wool that cost more than my first car. Behind him stood two lady vampires, looking like night and day. The one at his right shoulder was dressed in dark slacks with a leather jacket over her white blouse, her dark brown hair in a business-like bun. The other was blonde, wearing a diaphanous gown of white, her long hair loosely flowing around her neck and shoulders, watching us with a carefully disinterested look on her face. At least until I pulled Lenny in behind me. I felt him twitch at the same time her eyes narrowed slightly. Well, well, well, that tells us who the careless vampire is.

“Ah, the famous Full Blood, herself, gracing us with a visit,” Langsford said in a rich English accent.

Generally, Rover Teams have blanket authority to complete their assignments, answering to the Elders for their actions. In most cases, a Master vampire would defer to the Rovers on site in a matter that required their presence. But vampires are territorial and no Master liked having Rovers on hand to usurp their authority. The fact that we were only three months into the job and that Tanya was a vampire celebrity didn’t help in many cases.

I sighed again, already having an idea of how this would play out. Langsford noted my small huff of breath and turned his cool grey eyes on me. Sandy brown hair covered a high forehead, and framed high aristocratic cheekbones.

“And her pet human,” he added, studying me with amusement.

I shoved Lenny forward as Tanya began to speak.

“Thank you for such a gracious welcome,” she said, her tone sardonic.

“My heritage and Choice of mate aside, we’re here cleaning up a mess in your city,” she continued.

Obviously not used to this kind of response, the master vampire frowned.

“This is Lenny, who was Turned, here in Chicago, then left to fend for himself. He’s killed three humans in the last two weeks in the most blatant manner possible. The Coven assigned us to find him and stop him, as your organization has failed to do so.”

“See here, Ms. Demidova, I run this city, not New York, and I’ll decide what needs cleaning up,” he responded crossly.

“Actually, Mr. Langsford, you run this city at the whim of the Elders. But their whims can change rapidly! Now, who is responsible for Turning this man?” Tanya asked, her voice cold.

It generally took a lot to get her pissed off during introductions, but the English vampire had managed it in mere seconds.

Calvin studied her for a few moments, reappraising the situation then waved a hand at the big bruiser who had never stopped ogling Tanya.

Quick as thought, the big vamp grabbed Lenny by the throat, picked him effortlessly off the floor, then turned and smashed the young vampire’s head into one side of the marble fireplace, crushing the skull completely to paste. Immediately, two other men grabbed the twitching body and hauled it from the room so fast that only a few drops of blood spattered the floor.

Chapter 3

“Thank you for your assistance, Ms. Demidova. We’ll handle it from here,” Calvin said dismissively, speaking into the silence that had followed the rogue’s sudden death.

To give her credit, Tanya ignored the sudden violence better than I did, hardly giving a sign that it bothered her. But my connection to her fed me a cold hard rage at the casual way the rogue had been destroyed, while my own inner demon flared into my mind at the sudden carnage. I wasn’t overly bothered by the death of the young rogue vampire, his murderous start to the vampire life didn’t really endear him to me.

“It still doesn’t tell us who Turned him, and as you’ve precipitously killed the only one who could tell us, that makes things more difficult,” she said, arms crossed

Langsford concentrated completely on Tanya, ignoring my presence. Vampires always see me as human, which can be useful, but sometimes, like now, was irritating. My temper was already rising from the way the security guys had been ogling my vampire; Langsford's casual dismissal of my role lifted the beginnings of a red haze across my vision. The tear shaped necklace around my neck suddenly warmed noticeably where it touched my chest. I reined in my temper at its warning.

“You are accusing my people of an act against Coven law without evidence. The guilty Darkkin may have just been passing through,” Langsford said, his manner defiant.

Actually, dude, we pretty much got the guilty party figured out, but then maybe so do you. Tanya snorted as this ran thru my mind, able to pick up the flavor of my thoughts if not the exact detail.

“You’re amused?” he asked dangerously.

“Yes, actually. But let's get back to the topic on hand – catching the guilty party,” she said smoothly.

He leaned back, a smirk on his face.

“Leave it to us little princess, we'll handle it. Unless you think a vampire with scarcely two dozen years’ experience will do better than a Master vampire who has held power in this city for a century and a half? Helped, no doubt, by your human Chosen, as if such a thing was even possible!” he laughed derisively. “Hell, you were a complete mute for most of the last fifteen years!” he said, referring to her long period of silence.

The big guy that killed Len was openly laughing while waggling his eyebrows suggestively at Tanya.

Several other vamps were sneering our way, but not, I noticed, the business-like woman behind Calvin. She was looking a bit worried.

As well she should, as my anger was starting to rise like a red storm across my vision; the beast inside me squirming to get out. I have temper issues at the best of times and these were not them, but still I tried to control my anger.

Tanya glanced my way, touched one finger to my clenched fist, then ghosted to the painting on far side of the room, studying it. My anger reined in by her touch, I watched her curiously as did the rest of the vampires.

“Degas?” she asked.

“Hmm, yes,” Langsford answered, intrigued and annoyed.

She turned and wagged her index finger at me in a no-no signal before turning her attention back to the English vampire.

“Calvin Langsford, Master of Chicago, do you know why my Chosen and I were selected to be Rovers?” she asked.

“As most Rovers are at least a century of age and you not yet a quarter of that, I have to think it is a chance for Senka to thrust you into our faces,” he said.

“Actually, both Elder Senka and Elder Tsao insisted on it, but perhaps I can repeat what my grandmother told me,” Tanya said, moving to look at a small statue of a horse and rider.

She paused in her examination of the sculpture, standing straight then strangely she began changing her posture and facial expressions to become someone else. After a moment I realized she was imitating Elder Senka's mannerisms…exactly.

She spoke and her voice was Senka's, right down to every Oxford inflected vowel and consonant.

“Dearest granddaughter, you are, perhaps, wondering why you and young Christian have been selected as Rovers? Hmm, yes, so I thought,” Tanya began sounding like a recording of the most dangerous vampire on this continent.

“There are, of course, several reasons, the first being that now is an appropriate time for the Darkkin society to meet you and Chris, as well as for you to meet them. But beyond that it will be a growth experience as you both will need to draw on your abilities and skills in ways you have never, and may never, have call to, here in New York. Those very abilities, which are so much more advanced than Darkkin hundreds of years your seniors, need to be honed and tempered, especially young Christian's. It will be a chance for you both to learn to control his dark side, which frankly dear, worries both Tsao and I no small amount. But there is also another reason to unleash the two of you on our world. Changes are coming Tatiana, threats to our way of life that are difficult for vampires to imagine. Human science and technology advances at speeds beyond all reason, bringing new weapons, genetic engineering, robots, unmanned drones and eventually, artificial intelligence. Our race needs to be prepared if we're to survive. Those vampires too stupid and stuck in their ways to adapt need to be weeded out, now, while there is time. You, my dear, and your Chosen, and his...pet, will be a terrible test of our society,” she said, then paused, shifting her mannerisms and body language to become Tanya again. “How do you mean grandmother?” she asked in her own voice before shifting back to her eerie Senka impersonation.

“You are a prodigy at a tender twenty-four years of age, one that older vampires have difficulty comprehending. Your Chosen is all of two years old as we calculate these things, and he is terrifying as an infant, yet most Darkkin will see him only as a meal. They won't take either of you seriously, and the result, I'm afraid, will be something of a culling, as it were,” she finished with a cold chuckle that made even me forget who she was. “I think of your team as a force of unnatural selection, helping the Darkkin race to evolve.”

Her affected speech and body language fell away, becoming her own again, and it was as if the spirit of Senka had left the room. The other vampires were speechless, frozen at the inhuman and unprecedented display of acting.

She pointed at the statue then wagged her finger at me again, speaking this time. “Mind the Remington, Chris,” she said.

Langsford was as shaken as his underlings, but he pulled himself together.

“That was rather remarkable, although I have no idea why you feel we should believe it. And why do you treat your own Chosen like a dog, warning him away from furnishings?” he said. “He’s not going to pee on the carpets is he?”

“She's telling him which pieces not to destroy, Master,” the serious brunette by his shoulder said suddenly.

“Excuse me Claudette?” he asked, his face a cold mask.

I gave the lady vamp credit, she had balls, because she ignored his expression and explained her comment.

“It seems fairly clear, sir. Elder Senka expects vampires to challenge Tatiana's, ere, Ms. Demidova's Chosen, thinking him human and therefore not truly a Chosen. He will then kill them, removing them from Darkkin society. Ms. Demidova appears to believe such a challenge is imminent and is telling him which pieces of art to avoid,” she explained with quick glances at both Tanya and myself.

Tanya smiled and touched one finger to the tip of her nose.

“Claudette, you can't honestly buy into this drivel about Gordon here, can you?” he demanded with an angry wave in my direction.

“Actually, sir, I have connections in New York; people I trust, and they all tell stories about his battles – with werewolves, vampires and even Elder Fedor,” she said, obviously uncomfortable under his wilting gaze, focusing on me instead.

“Ah, do you see how dangerous this…this propaganda is, Ms. Demidova? Even my assistant has begun to believe the drivel that is spreading about you. Enough for her to buy into your little act. But I think Dominick here is less gullible, eh, Dom?” he asked the big guy that had killed Lenny.

“Oh, right you are Mr. Langsford, sir. I’m not one for theatre or fiction, but I’m not averse to playing bedroom games, ‘specially when the game involves such prizes,” he replied, looking Tanya over from top to bottom, focusing on her hips and chest.

The monster inside me demanded out.

“So I’ll be challenging Gordon here for you. He’s no proper kind of choice. I’ll show you a real choice!” the big vampire continued, making a show of hip thrusts.

“A formal Challenge then?” Tanya asked her voice dangerously quiet.

“Oh yes, it’s official,” said Langsford, nodding at Dominick who instantly started his rush my way.

‘You’re up!’ I told my inner demon, letting Grim take over. Immediately, the world became sharper and brighter, as every detail of the room around me was mapped and laid out on a mental grid. Every vampire’s position was plotted, their bodies shaded in thermal vision, their slow beating hearts visible to my eyes as orange lumps in dark chests.

Dominick’s blinding rush slowed to a molasses crawl as Grim side-stepped , moving closer to Langsford’s desk. I watched my right hand snatch up the crystal brandy decanter as my left hand, which was wreathed with a monomolecular edge of hardened purple aura, sliced off the neck and top of the thick lead glass at an angle. The result was a heavy crystal jar with a sharp glass edge, like the tip of a giant hypodermic needle. Grim put the container to use as I/we spun behind the slow moving Dominick, shoving the jar through the vampire’s back, slightly to the left of center.

The blow was powerful enough to jam the decanter all the way through the ninety year old vampire’s chest, his heart instantly canned like last summer’s tomatoes. My left hand caught the sudden corpse by its hair, arresting the forward movement and then pulled back, throwing Dominick’s remains off my right arm which was elbow deep, and into the same marble fireplace that was already stained with Lenny’s brains and blood.

Grim stood us in front of Langsford’s desk, gently setting the bloody jar full of heart on the cherry surface. My combat persona can drive my virus modified body at speeds that equal Tanya’s and at somewhat greater power. Tanya was the only vampire in the room who had followed my actions, the rest not being able to perceive the movements as anything but a continuous blur, although most of Langsford’s side of the room was now speckled with a fine misting of blood.

It takes a great deal to horrify a vampire, especially one as old as Calvin Langsford, and I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t grossed out by the crystal decanter of blood and heart, a bit of aorta spilling over the edge. But when his eyes flicked up to look at mine, seeing Grim staring back at him, the fear was blatant. He froze as the realization of how close he was to his own death hit home.

Older vampires grow contemptuous of most threats, only fearing older and more powerful vampires than themselves. Growing stronger and more impervious as they age, they find it that much harder to face a true threat when it does show up.

“Anyone else want to Challenge Christian?” Tanya asked in a soft voice.

“How about you Langsford? Want to see how far you get with my human pet?” she continued.

Langsford flicked his eyes to hers then quickly back to me, carefully not moving any other part of his body. Every other vampire in the room was frozen, watching me like I was a Black Mamba.

“No?” Tanya said. “Well, congratulations, it looks like you beat the odds. The office pool back in the Citadel had you down as one of the casualties of our visit.”

He finally found his voice, looking back her way. “Office pool?”

“Yeah, Headquarters has a running betting pool on the number and identity of vampires that will die when our team visits a Coven location. Some, like Cincinnati, have a big zero down, as the Darkkin in that city tend to be more adaptable and quicker to believe the grapevine. Chicago, on the other hand, had as many as seven Darkkin down for ‘Death by Christian’, and your name was listed at the top.”

My Grim side watched him even as it tracked all movement in the building. Blood ran down my right arm, dripping on a priceless Persian rug.

“You see, Master Langsford..” she said, twisting his tile and name a bit, “..the stories about Christian don’t really do him justice. You see and smell him as human, and a delectable one at that. The reality is that he’s a predator of us. He kills vampires and weres like you consume prostitutes, and he’s so good at it that he makes the Elders nervous, and he’s two of our years old!”

Grim retreated, leaving me control of my voice as I protested her words.

“Tanya, I’m not two!” I said.

“Only by our way of measuring age, zayka,” she said. “It just boggles the mind thinking what you will be like at ten or twenty, let alone a hundred years of age.”

Calvin’s facial expression was priceless as the impact of her words hit him, especially as I think he understood the Russian word zayka as bunny, the equivalent term of endearment as honey.

I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever be more of a threat than I am now, but the vampires sure seem to think so.

“Now Master Langsford, if the question of my Chosen is settled – “ she glanced around at the frozen vampires, then not seeing any new contenders, she continued, “ we can get to the bottom of which of your flock here is responsible for negligently creating Lenny the rogue.”

Tanya had been strolling closer to the desk and as she finished her sentence she picked up the jar with Dominick’s canned heart in it. She studied it for a moment then without warning tossed it to the blonde vampire behind Langsford, further spattering her already blood speckled dress.

The blonde automatically caught the crystal container, eyes widening at the implication. She looked up at Tanya, then me, finally turning to her Master in panic.

“Master you can’t think…., I didn’t do it….. why are you accusing me? You don’t have proof!” she said in a flurry.

“What’s your name?” I asked. She jumped when I spoke to her, as if she was shocked that I could actually talk and form words.

“Chantel,” she answered, then turned back to Langsford to continue her pleading.

“Master, you aren’t going to let them accuse me, are you? They have no proof.”

He looked at her stricken face for a moment then turned back to Tanya.

“What proof do you have of Chantel’s guilt?” he said, which struck me as a very odd way to phrase things.

“Actually, none. But both she and the rogue reacted to seeing each other when we came in,” Tanya admitted.

“That’s hardly proof, Ms. Demidova,” he said.

“Oh, it’s not any kind of proof at all. But it is suspicious and I find it unlikely that the two would know each other if she wasn’t his Maker,” Tanya said. “But vampires operate in tight knit groups, closer than a similar mix of humans would be. I’m willing to bet someone in this room knows if it was Chantel or not. My hope is to clear this up now, rather than have to bring in a Reader, like say Nika, to get this solved. “

Readers are telepaths, and Nika, who was almost as close to Tanya as Lydia, was one of the most powerful in the Coven. Older vampires could block her, but bringing in a Reader was akin to a lie detector test in the human world. All vampires would be expected to lower their mental shields and cooperate with the investigation.

“The goal here, Master Langsford, is to clear this up as quickly as possible, so Christian and I can get on our way. Bringing in Nika would most likely turn up all manner of other problems and issues, don’t you think?” she asked.

Every territory of vampires in the Coven was run by a Master, none of who desired the upper echelon to delve too deep into their personal kingdoms. Nika would rip through the Chicago Coven’s secrets in minutes, finding indiscretions, mistakes, and crimes against the vampire society. Every Coven had them and every Master wanted them kept buried.

Langsfords eyes glittered as he mentally ran through the implications.

“Chantel, my dear, I’m afraid you must own up to this,” he said after a moment. Wow, nice to know your boss had your back – not! But then vampires are just people, violent, blood sucking predatory people, but people nonetheless.

To give her credit, Chantel wasted no time in protesting her innocence, she simply fled at top speed. Her rush to the door went unimpeded, either by Tanya and I or any of the Chicago vampires. But when she yanked opened the door and went through it, she ran into a wall of brown fur. The furry barrier stood nine and a half feet tall on its hind legs and weighted a solid thousand pounds. Those figures aren’t guesses, I know them because I measure and weigh the furry wall on a regular basis, in both of his forms, to keep track of his growth.

Chantel bounced off of Awasos’s massive bear form and into the arms of two vampires, too shocked to resist.

Chapter 4

The rest of the trip went fast. Chantel was tried, judged and sentenced by Langsford, who then oversaw her execution. Tanya, Awasos and I witnessed the proceedings then left Chicago quickly.

“Master Langsford will, of course, blame us for this, Chris, so we don’t want to hang around waiting for retaliation. Better to get out of the city,” Tanya said, as she drove the big SUV North on I-94. Within several miles we found a rest stop, where we pulled over and went over the car with one of Chet Akins sophisticated bug scanners. Sure enough it had two trackers on it, one under the lip of the hood, the other in left rear wheel well. We got back on the Interstate and continued north.

After a time she exited the Interstate and took side roads, finally stopping at an Italian restaurant outside of Milwaukee. I ate enough ziti and pasta fagioli for both of us, bought a family-sized takeout tray of eggplant parmesan and another of lasagna for Awasos, then we stopped in a small park near one of the hundreds of lakes in that area and I fed Tanya, while Awasos terrorized the nocturnal wildlife.

When she had finished her dinner, we called Citadel on one of the encrypted cell phones that we carry. Tanya gave a pretty full report to Lydia, including the names of the deceased vampires and the identity of the rogue.

“Only two dead?” Lydia asked over the speaker, her voice incredulous. “Jeeze Chris, this is no time for you to develop self-control, I’ve got a lot riding on these visits!”

“There really is a pool?” I asked. I hadn’t heard of it until Tanya mentioned it back in Chicago.

“Yeah, but sadly I’m forbidden from participating. Some people think I would use my position to influence the results,” she replied in mock outrage. “But I do consult with the ones in the pool, offering my expert opinion…for a fee.”

“Gee Lydia, that’s shocking! Who could believe that you might lead Chris to believe that this vampire or that vampire had been courting me for years before he came on scene,” Tanya said, smirking in my direction.

“Wait, vampires have been courting you?” I asked, suddenly getting angry.

“Damn, it would have been easier than I thought!” Lydia, blurted.

“Hah! Caught you Lyd!” Tanya said into the phone before turning to me. “And yes, Chris, many vampires sought my attention before you came along.”

“They still do,” Lydia said.

“What? Who?” I demanded.

“You’re so not helping Lydia. Stop baiting him,” Tanya said while touching my hand. My anger fell away as her touch and our bond fed me reassurance.

My demon tainted blood is a huge boost to my combat skills, but it’s hell on my temper. Everyone gets angry and annoyed from time to time. The standard frustrations of everyday life guarantee it. The aggressive driver that cuts you off, the old lady counting change to pay for her groceries and holding up ten people, the loud mouth who cuts line at the Burger King; they’re all going to raise our blood pressure and make us see red. The difference is that my demonically altered blood urges me to take action, to make the violent images that run through my head a graphic reality. The standard run-of-the-mill anger management class is sooo not gonna work for me.

But I’m getting there, bit by bit. Tanya can calm me with a touch or word. Oddly, Awasos, my furry were-bear-wolf (not sure what else to call him) is also a good influence on my violent temper. His huge head, in either form, has a tendency to shove itself under my hand when I’m struggling to keep from quite literally tearing the head off the 90th guy of the day to hit on Tanya, right in front of me like I wasn’t there beside her. She handles them adeptly, often making them look like fools, but ultimately leaving them unharmed. Still my anger bubbles just beneath the surface, so I have to keep control, keep my dark side reined in. But hey, we all have problems, right?

“They never believe that you could have Chosen me, because I’m not vampire,” I stated, my voice flat.

“Vampires are the original racists Chris,” Lydia said over the speaker, “which is why they flock to Tanya – she’s the purest of our race.”

Tanya slid across my lap, straddling my thighs and holding my face in both white hands.

“Listen, this Rover assignment is all about us – “ she shook my head slightly, “ – meeting the Darkkin world head on and educating them on who we are. Do you think that any Chicago vampire would fail to take you seriously after tonight?”

I shook my head side to side.

“Chris, wanna bet on how fast the word of Citadel’s death pool spreads from Chicago? Langsford’s people are some of the biggest gossips in the Coven,” Lydia said.

Tanya looked into my eyes, gauging my expression, all while reading the bond that we share.

“Okay, back to business,” she said, concluding I was reassured. “Lyd, we’re gonna want a new vehicle, I don’t trust Langsford not to retaliate,” she said into the phone.

A dark form moved by the edge of the clearing we were parked in. The heavy bulk of Awasos in bear form moved out of the gloom, his shape outlined by the faint light of dawn that was beginning to show in the eastern sky.

“Already on it. I’ve gotta white Tahoe waiting for you in Milwaukee,” Lydia responded. “Here are the directions.”

I lifted Tanya off of my lap and slid out of the vehicle while she talked logistics with the little vampire who was her closest friend, confidant and girl Friday.

All of our vehicles came equipped with boxes of non-perishable food, stuff like granola bars, trail mix, protein shakes and the like. It was considered standard equipment for any car that I would be traveling in. I grabbed the current ride’s offerings and headed over to my bear. He was sprawled on the ground looking east, head on his paws, but his massive skull swiveled around to me as I approached.

“Hey bud, wanna snack?” I asked, flopping down next to him. Silly question. Weres are always hungry and the only were-bear-wolf in existence had a metabolism higher than mine. I ripped open a case of blueberry Cliff bars and piled them in front of him, holding back two for myself. We munched quietly, listening to Tanya and Lydia plot plan the next leg of our trip.

“Ferry?” I asked around a mouthful of dry protein bar. “We’re really gonna take a ferry across Lake Michigan?”

“It’s the most direct route to Michigan and our next assignment is in the Upper Peninsula,” Tanya explained.

I poured three chocolate energy shakes down Awasos black hole of a mouth, then sipped one of my own as I thought about crossing the lake. Water can be an issue for supernaturals and there seemed very little natural about me these days. Weres and vampires are denser than humans, especially weres, so swimming is problematic. Vampires can go long periods on a single breath, but not so weres. An accident in the middle of Lake Michigan could be a real issue for Awasos, myself and to a lesser degree, Tanya. Of course a basic life vest or in Awasos’s case, several life vests, could go a long way toward mitigating the problem. I made a mental note to keep a close eye on the Coast Guard required safety gear on board the ship.

Dawn was fast approaching as we finished our snack, Tanya starting to yawn as the sun’s presence weighed upon her vampire mind. She had a pretty good tolerance for sunlight and could walk in direct light, but it still made her sleepy. Our routine was now honed after three months on the road. I drove in the mornings, she drove in the early evenings and we shared the driving during the dark of night. We could, and had, driven straight through to many of our assignments without rest, but if time wasn’t a factor we generally holed up in the middle of the day, both asleep, with Awasos on watch.

Time was a factor in this case, both to remove ourselves from Chicago’s zone of influence as well as get to the next problem, which I still didn’t know the details of.

Tanya handed me the directions for the next vehicle switch, then curled up in the back seat, protected by the special window tinting that all Coven vehicles were equipped with. Awasos ambled to the back, changing form in mid-step from a 1,000 pound grizzly to a 250 pound wolf. He just fits much better in the SUV in the smaller form, plus the extra 750 pounds would absolutely kill our gas mileage – gotta stay as green as we can.

The speed and smoothness of his change was still shocking to me. I’ve seen many weres change from human to animal or beast-man form and it is never an easy process. For young or new weres it’s downright painful. But Awasos moves between wolf and bear with liquid ease. Never mind that losing 750 pounds of mass flies in the face of everything I learned in high school physics. Chet, my brainy buddy back at the Citadel, has no problem with it, but is still intensely curious about the mass balance. When I asked him about Conservation of Mass once he just shook his head. “Dude, that’s in a closed system. Awasos lives in a very open system,’ he said, gesturing at the world around us. “Plus, quantum physics seem to indicate that even a system we think is closed, really isn’t.”

“So where does his extra mass go or come from?” I’d asked.

He shrugged before replying. “Maybe some mountain in Peru is suddenly short a boulder or two, maybe it comes from inside the earth itself, or maybe it’s the elusive Dark Matter from the cosmos around us. I haven’t gathered enough information to form a hypothesis yet.”

That shortage of data wasn’t for lack of trying though. Chet was continually using some new piece of high-tech gear to gather information from my furry friend. I had worried that Awasos might get annoyed by Chet’s science projects, but just as he loved Lydia, he loved Chet as well, often hanging with the lanky and definitely geeky tech specialist. Chet also helped me track Awasos’s growth which had been nothing short of incredible. Only nine months old, he was already larger than ninety-five percent of all wolves and the same size as a Kodiak bear four times his age. Of course, it’s hard to predict the growth pattern from a creature whose mother was an exceptionally large Kodiak and whose father was a mythical Norse god-wolf.

We drove east by northeast, getting occasionally good views of the breaking dawn. Just outside Milwaukee we pulled into an industrial park, following the street signs and the GPS till we found a non-descript building that could have housed a manufacturing company, a small warehouse or a cluster of corporate offices. A human employee, male, middle-aged, met us at the front of the building and directed me to drive around to the array of overhead doors that lined one side of the building. He raised the closest door and we drove into a vast space that held ten vehicles in its center. Shelving units, dimly visible in the back, were laden with supplies of unknown type and origin.

The attendant, who was about five foot, eight with a balding head, compact build and the beginnings of a paunch, pointed at an empty parking slot between a dark blue, new model Camaro and a large white Tahoe. As I got out of the Suburban, he handed me the keys to the Tahoe and held out his hand for my keys, all without saying a word.

“Morning,” I said, trying to catch his eye, but he just nodded and looked down. Tanya got out and stretched lithely, causing the reticent caretaker to about burst an eyeball. His eyes got even wider when I opened the back and a giant wolf form jumped lightly to the ground. He still never said a word, just took down a tablet computer and started checking in the Suburban like this was Avis or something.

It took less than five minutes to transfer our stuff and then we were rolling back out into the new day, all without ever saying a word to the facility’s caretaker.

“Is that normal?” I asked Tanya.

“Hmm?” she replied, sleepy.

“That facility or warehouse…does the Coven keep many places like that?” I clarified.

“Yes, hundreds, at least in this country, thousands all over the world,” she answered.

“Are they always manned by a creepy silent guy?” I asked.

“They all have a well paid staff that keeps the vehicles maintained and the supplies current. Such people are specifically selected to be…how should we say it? Lacking curiosity?” she said, opening one gorgeous blue eye to meet my gaze in the rearview mirror. “They’re manned twenty-four, seven, three-sixty-five. He would have received a fax or email, sometimes a phone call informing him of our arrival and needs.”

“And if we needed weapons?” I asked.

She closed her eye and snorted. Of course there would be pre-stockpiled weapons, silly me!

“He probably has a military background,” I commented.

“We recruit retiring military logistic and supply personnel. They’re really well paid for a job that’s easier than the one they held in the military. Each facility has enough personnel that no one is overworked.”

“What about shrinkage?” I asked, referring to theft.

“Everything is computer inventoried with regular audits. The people we hire have to have squeaky clean backgrounds, not a hint of trouble. Occasionally, one of the audits will include a mindreader type.”

“Have there ever been any problems?” I asked.

“Of course. People are people,” she replied.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The problems went away,” she said, sleepily.

I sometimes forget that the love of my life is a vampire, a pure predator. She’s not really a cruel sort, but she has killer instinct by the gallon, it’s part and parcel of who she is. She doesn’t like vampires to kill humans with wanton disregard, but when the situation merits it, she is not squeamish.

Time to change the subject.

“Do you ever get tired of older vampires not taking us seriously?” I asked, thinking of how much trouble could have been avoided if Langsford hadn’t been so blinded by Tanya’s age.

“You have no idea!” she replied, her voice no longer sounding tired. “What none of them realize is that I was in my mother’s womb, unchanging for over two hundred years. Every experience and situation Galina went through, I was there too.”

“You absorbed those experiences?” I asked, completely taken off-guard.

“Yes….when I encounter a new situation, I almost always have some sense or feeling of how to deal with it…like I’ve done it before. Not really a full memory, more like the ghost of a memory,” she said.

“I never knew that!” I said, glancing at her in the rearview. Both blue eyes looked back at me.

“I don’t think I’ve ever thought much about it. It has just always been there.”

We both fell silent, each thinking our own thoughts.

Chapter 5

The ferry that crosses Lake Michigan is a modern high-speed vessel that traverses the width of Great Lake up to four times daily, with each trip taking about two and a half hours. Because its operations fall under the supervision of the US Coast Guard, security is pretty tight. Passengers travelling on foot from Milwaukee to Muskegon pass through an airport type screening, while vehicles like our Tahoe get their own thorough inspection.

“Any firearms or dangerous substances in the vehicle Sir?” the security guard asked as we both stood, along with his black lab bomb-sniffing dog, outside the SUV.

“No but I have a beast,” I said with a grin as I opened the back tailgate, revealing Awasos in wolf form.

“Holy shit! What the hell is that? A pony?” he asked, scrambling back as the big wolf jumped down. The black lab whined and cringed when Awasos sniffed him, but relaxed slightly when the much bigger animal ignored him to come meet the guard.

“Well, we’re not entirely sure. He may have some pony in his bloodline for all we know. He’s pretty much a mutt. Aren’t you buddy?” I responded before continuing. “We notified the office when we made our reservations that we had a canine. He’ll ride in the Tahoe, of course.”

“Yes, well dogs and Dire wolves aren’t allowed on deck so that’s where he’ll have to stay. How much does he weigh?”

“A bit over two hundred,” I said, deciding that fifty pounds here or there wasn’t a big deal. Another guard came over, whistling in awe as he sized up Awasos.

The first guard had relaxed a bit as he took in the calm attitude of the giant canine who was leaning his bulk against me and wagging his tail. Awasos does a great ‘doggy’ impersonation when the situation warrants it. Plus I think he honestly likes most people.

“Can I pet him?” the first guard asked, the second one interested in my response.

“Sure, he loves it,” I answered, moving to open Tanya’s door. She opened her eyes sleepily then took my hand as I ‘helped’ her out. It would honestly have been ideal if she could have stayed in the car with Awasos and slept, but the Coast Guard rules forbade it, so she and I would move to the passenger cabin for the duration.

The guards caught an eyeful of my lifemate and promptly forgot Awasos, the car, the other passengers and their jobs. I held her hand while forking over both our drivers’ licenses, playing the role of dutiful husband. Honestly, I probably would have held her hand anyway, my possessive side coming out in the face of their wide-eyed admiration for her appearance.

The second guard studied the ID’s – well Tanya’s ID anyway, while the first just stared.

Slim and curvy in expensive jeans and a designer tee, Tatiana looked like a movie star or fashion model, capturing the attention of pretty much everyone within eyesight.

The guards forgot about me completely as I stood with Awasos. Crouching down next to his massive shoulder I pointed at a rack of life vests tucked in an overhead compartment on the vehicle deck. “If something happens with the boat, get a couple of those around you, got it?” I told him. A tongue like a handkerchief licked my face. It looked like something any dog would do, but I knew he understood me. Awasos is so much more intelligent than any animal I had met or heard of including, in my estimation, chimps, dolphins, and more than half the human race. He understood complex instructions and directions and was able to convey his own thoughts through body language and vocal expression. He often seemed to know what I needed him to do before I did. He jumped back into the SUV just as an officer of the boat spotted him and came over with a concerned look on his face. Before he could express his opinion on the matter of having a giant wolf onboard, his attention was captured by Tanya who immediately charmed him into distraction.

Legend has it that vampires can twist humans to their own desires. The folklore usually involves mind powers that cloud the victims mind like a Jedi using the Force. While there did exist a small number of vampires with the ability to mentally force behavior changes, they were very rare. One named Desiderio Reyes had majorly impacted my life before Tanya killed him.

But every vampire I had ever met had an innate form of charm and a personal attractiveness that usually worked almost as well as Obi-wan Kenobi. And if a run of the mill vampire had a strong dose, then Tanya’s personal allotment was off the charts.

Both security guards and the ship’s officer had completely forgotten any concerns or basic screening procedures when faced with my vampire’s dazzling smile. All three had a slightly stunned look on their faces as I finished closing up the Tahoe and moving to Tanya’s side.

“Thank you so much gentlemen! I feel so much better now about the trip. You must think me awfully silly for being worried?” she said to the three stricken men.

“Oh, no ma’am. Not at all. Lake Michigan is a big body of water, but this is the finest ferry on it and we’ll get you across safe and sound, don’t you worry!” the ship’s officer was saying.

“There, dear, feel better?” I asked my role playing partner.

The three men looked at me in annoyance for interrupting their chance to win her attention. I’ve seen the same effect with men and beautiful women time and again. It was just magnified to ridiculous proportions in this case.

Tanya executed a smooth disengagement, thanking them all profusely as I guided her up the passageway to the ship’s main cabin. Neither of us had been fully screened for weapons, which was a good thing in Tanya’s case as she had several blades on her. I didn’t bother with weapons this time as my ability to modify my strange purple aura into edges, spikes and particle beams seemed more than sufficient.

We found seats against one bulkhead in the first class section of the ship and Tanya promptly curled into the plush chair with my sweatshirt as a pillow and fell asleep. Passengers milled about, finding and settling into their personal spaces. Businessmen, families with kids, retirees and tourists all swirled about the main cabin. Below us, on the auto deck, the last vehicles were being loaded. Heads swiveled to look out the rear windows at the last car to come aboard as something interesting captured their attention. A pair of young corporate types in suits were sipping Starbucks coffee and watching the drama, whatever it was. I focused my ears on them, blocking the other conflicting sounds of the compartment out, one by one, till I could hear their conversation.

“What happened?” one asked the other who had apparently seen more.

“That van, the dark one at the end? The dudes inside were giving the security guys a hard time about checking over their van. Hey look at that – the bomb dog really doesn’t like them!” the other businessman said, voice rising slightly in excitement. Outside I could hear the black lab’s bark and his handler’s sharp command.

Bomb dogs don’t bark when they find something. Instead, they usually are trained to sit or turn in a circle or otherwise show an olfactory hit. Barking was very unusual in such a highly trained animal.

“Those guys look pretty shifty to me,” the first corporate ladder-climber responded. “They probably have drugs or something they don’t want found.”

“You might be right, look how jittery they all are,” his friend responded.

Something about the word jittery caught my attention, but then the loudspeakers announced departure and the passengers all swarmed to their seats.

The crew cast off and the ferry pulled carefully away from the dock, powerful engines revving as the pilot maneuvered us out into open water. It was the ship’s first run of the day and the crew was mostly cheerful as they handled the business of transporting over forty cars, trucks, motorcycles and a couple hundred passengers from one state to the next.

The ship’s café was open for business and I headed up to continue the never ending battle against my own metabolism. My doctor, who is a specialist in vampire and were physiology, thinks that I could potentially survive on boot leather if I had too. My digestive system has become so efficient and aggressive that it virtually rips anything organic into potential nutrients. Thankfully, this morning’s menu was more like egg, bacon, and cheese sandwiches (six), danishes(five) , two cartons of milk and a sixteen ounce bottle of orange juice. It beat the hell out of chowing down on my Timberlands.

My bag of goodies in hand I settled next to my sleeping vampire, ignoring the stares of people who were either appalled at my caloric intake or fascinated by my violet eyes and supermodel-looking girlfriend.

Halfway through my fourth breakfast sandwich, a crew member came in through the outside door from the coach class passenger area, a cool breeze following him. The lake moistened air washed over my face and I paused in mid-bite. Mixed in with the diesel fumes, the fishy smell of Lake Michigan and the metallic smell of dozens of cars, was an odor that caught my immediate attention. Just a whiff, but unmistakable in its rank, musky signature. Almost skunk-like, but different. Weasel!

Chapter 6

I hate weasels! Actually, I only hate wereweasels, the regular wild kind don’t bother me. But the six foot, mongoose-quick, were-kind evoked an immediate response in me. Grim was suddenly in control, the sandwich in my hand now a potential weapon. Tanya woke instantly, probably from both the smell and my own response.

Wereweasels are the go-to assassins of the supernatural world. They live to kill and are incredibly good at it. Lacking the muscle mass of the wolves, bears, and big cats, they made up for it in speed and insatiable blood lust. A single weasel assassin had once killed a vampire in a bar, then killed everyone else in the place, just for fun. Were weasels on board the ferry couldn’t be a coincidence. Last time I met a weasel it killed me…or came pretty damned close anyway.

My vampire and I looked at each other, our interpersonal link clicking into a higher level, just a hair shy of the eerie yet seductive level of oneness that happens to us in combat. We both moved to the back of the room, standing and leaving our seats fast enough that most of the people around us missed it.

Looking out the rear windows we could just see the last row of cars on the auto-deck below. An older-model grey panel van was parked second from the right, looking like a child-molester special, lacking only a ‘free candy’ sign on the side.

“Excuse me? Did you see who was in that grey van?” I asked the two corporate types. They turned, slightly startled to find me suddenly in their part of the lounge, then straightened as they caught sight of my companion.

“Actually we were just talking about them. Five or six guys in really awful track suits got out. They had some argument with the security guys, but must have passed inspection,” the shorter of the two said, his eyes flickering between Tanya and I, mostly straying to her.

“I, personally, wouldn’t have let them onboard,” the tall one said, giving Tanya a practiced smile.

“Why?” I asked.

The shorter one answered as the tall one suddenly looked uncertain in the face of Tanya’s complete lack of response. She was in combat mode and the dangerous vibe that emanated from her presence was powerful enough to penetrate their beauty-addled brains. The oldest part of the human mind, the bit that closely resembles a reptilian brain, picks up cues that the newer evolved, ‘smarter’ sections don’t always catch. Danger cues, like the ones my uber-vampire was giving off.

“They gotta be drug addicts, the way they were all herky- jerky, just about shaking,” he said.

“Ah,” I said, remembering their earlier use of the word jittery. Weasels are high energy, even for weres, and their movements reflect that. They end up looking like a drug addict with a bad case of withdrawal. They also possess predatory eyes, the eyes of killers, which is another cue for most humans, though they assume it means the weasels are just the run-of-the-mill violent, criminal sort of addicts.

The weasels weren’t in the first class lounge so we headed for the ferry’s regular class cabin. The quicker we took the fight to them the better it would be for us and everyone on board.

Moving out of the lounge, we headed through the narrow passageway to the regular cabin, operating in silence. Our link’s bandwidth had increased to the point that I was ‘feeling’ her movements before she made them and she felt mine.

There were four doors from the auto deck up to the upper passenger area. All four led to stairwells that emptied into the two parallel passageways that bracketed the economy class cabin with its rows of airline style seating. The twin hallways then lead further forward to the premier cabin which we had just left. We both entered the standard cabin at its forward most doorway, immediately spotting three shifty, dark-eyed weasels diagonally across the cabin at the last entry on the other side. Dressed in mismatched combinations of track suits, they all had sharp pointed facial features and herky-jerky movements. All three were in the process of leaving the cabin, but the last in line noticed us and grinned, his teeth looking sharper than they should.

Tanya cut straight across the cabin, moving fast enough that her supermodel looks didn’t attract as much attention as normal. I headed back into the corridor, moving toward the stairwell to the auto deck. The ferry company and its crew had been clear that no one was allowed on the auto deck during the trip, even posting staff members to keep an eye on the stairwell doors. The crew member at the top of the nearest stairwell nodded at me as I moved past him. The next stairwell on that side of ship was unmanned; the door was unlatched and open a bit. The ship’s officer who was supposed to be watching was slumped, unconscious, in a pile on the stairwell.

As I discovered this, my bond to Tanya told me she was experiencing a similar set of circumstances in the other corridor. Separated though we were, I knew we were moving in lockstep as we descended the stairwell. And we both knew we were heading into a trap.

Most of the human security team that the Coven employs are ex-military and mostly ex-special ops types. I hang with them more than I do with vampires and I’ve listened to their discussions of small group tactics. On the topic of ambush and traps their opinions are fairly consistent. If you know the trap exists you can avoid it, take an alternative approach, or intentionally trip it. If caught in an ambush you attack. With more time we could have taken a different approach, maybe from the open rear of the auto deck or something. But time was short, Awasos was alone in our Tahoe, now surrounded by as many as six weasels, and as strong as he is he is still less than a year old. So we tripped the trap, so to speak, but we did it at speed.

Linked as one, we simultaneously rocketed through the closed doors at the bottom of the stairwell. Even sturdy ships doors weren’t meant for that kind of abuse; they both tore free from their hinges, each smashing into the closest parked car. Car alarms sounded their strident wail, but the fight was in full swing before the electronic squeal was complete. Six weasels, each fully Shifted into twisted ropes of fur, muscle and teeth, waited for us, standing on their discarded track suits. But even with their preternatural speed, they weren’t prepared for our tactics. Instead of each turning to fight the closest furred killers, we blasted straight out the doors, diving across the cavernous space, using vampire energy techniques to extend our dives and speed our flight. I leapfrogged the nearest car, which also happened to be the one to get smashed by the door. Stretching out in a forward dive I cleared the other two cars as Tanya did the same. We crossed over the parked cars, passing each other before slamming into the threesomes of corded muscle and fur that were already reacting.

The weasel facing Tanya’s stairwell was fast enough to turn completely around just as I smashed into him. Both clawed front feet raked my rib cage as his head darted toward my throat. Shocked at his speed, I managed to arrest his fang strike by the simple expedient of driving my right bladed hand, covered with an edge of hardened aura a single molecule in width, straight through his throat and neck, decapitating him instantly. Rolling forward and off the still kicking body, I dropped and spun on one knee as the other two slammed into me from either side. Fangs scored my skull on one side and my shoulder on the other, but both of my outstretched, aura-edged arms had completed their passage through the dense bodies of the weres, like helicopter blades cutting through a cloud.

I stood up meeting Tanya’s eyes as the last of her opponents slid free from the silver blade in her hand, while my last two fell apart with meaty thunks. She had killed two in her diving flight across the room, slipping silver tipped death into their brains in mid-flight. Her latest weapon was a variation of what’s known as a tactical pen. Usually made from hardened aluminum or titanium, these pointed pens are fully functional for writing, look expensive, but make excellent fighting spikes. Tanya’s were made of titanium with the spike layered in silver which in turn was covered with a peel away coating of rubber like plastic. They easily passed security in every airport we had used, but in her hands they were deadly killers. Her knife was a small solid titanium blade, inlaid with enough silver to be lethal to were-kind and vampires alike.

Blood dripped off my arms, but Tanya was barely mussed. She only needed to wipe off her three blades to be clean. My cleanup was gonna be a bitch.

“I gotta start using blades,” I muttered to her. She arched one exquisite eyebrow and pointed at the two cars whose alarms were going wild.

I channeled a burst of aura into each car, silencing the alarms and likely shorting most of the electrical systems. The actual fight had only taken a couple of seconds, so the alarms hadn’t been going off very long. Still, we hadn’t much time to clean up the scene. I started tossing chunks of weasel off the back of the ship, trusting their very density to make them sink. I did it fast, the bodies a mere blur and since I threw them into the turbulence that the high speed ferry’s jets threw up, there wasn’t much impact spray. Tanya meanwhile hosed the deck at full vampire speed with a handy firehose, then hosed me off as well. I did a rapid clothes change at the Tahoe with a pat or two for a sleepy Awasos who had missed the whole thing. Two minutes of intense activity and we were done. The damage cars and broken doors would have to be a mystery as would the driverless grey van that no one would ever claim. I felt bad for the cars owners but it could have been a blood bath with a six weasel team in a kill frenzy.

Hearing approaching footsteps, we darted forward to the other stairwells, climbed almost to where the crewmembers stood watch, then jumped up to the ceiling of the stairwell. We held ourselves above the head of the young employee that suddenly bounded down the stairs, talking excitedly on his radio. As soon as he was clear, we lowered ourselves back down, and reentered the premier cabin, reclaiming our seats. If anyone noticed my change of clothing they didn’t mention it. Likely they didn’t as my vampire claimed most of the other passengers’ attention.

Tanya curled back up and I finished my breakfast snack, while using my abnormal hearing to monitor the suddenly frantic crew who were trying to figure out how two autos and two doors got damaged, and two crew members rendered unconscious. Anxious white uniforms appeared in the doorways checking out the passengers, while trying to remain inconspicuous. It didn’t work as a low buzz of excitement spread among our fellow travelers.

An hour and fifty minutes later, the ferry docked. The captain had us stay in the cabin till the owners of the damaged cars were found, then we were directed to drive off the ship and park near the line of police cars that met the ship at the dock. Since our car was near the front of the line we were closest to leaving, stopped only by a Michigan State Police car parked in front of us. Everyone was told they had to remain till police could question them, but we decided to speed things up. Tanya approached the closest huddle of uniformed officers, capturing their immediate attention. She spoke a couple of quick sentences to them and then they were hurrying to move the cruiser. She climbed back in the Tahoe and we drove off.

“Jedi voice tricks?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Letting us go, they were happy to be,” she replied in a perfect Yoda voice.

Chapter 7

We drove out of Muskegon, heading northeast for three hours before pulling into an economy motel. I paid with a Coven credit card, using a fake driver’s license, then drove the Tahoe around back to room 23, where I woke Tanya, grabbed our bags and let Awasos out to pee. A maintenance type driving a zero turn lawn mower paused to watch my large canine friend stretch his legs, then just shook his head and kept mowing. Back at the room I found Tanya had roused herself enough to text a detailed account of the weasel attack to Lydia. Then she hit the bed and was out cold. Seeing as it was noonish, Awasos and I split a party platter of Subway subs I had picked up on the way, then I showered, shaved, and crawled into bed next to my mate. Questions about the assassination attempt chased each other through my brain till the overworked lump of grey matter refused any further thinking and I passed out.

When I next peeled my crusty eyelids open, five hours had passed. Tanya was just coming out of the bathroom, hair wet from her shower, dressed only in French lingerie that cost as much as a new refrigerator. She paused in full view to answer a text on her iPhone, before coolly raising her eyes to meet mine.

“I’m hungry,” she said with a slight growl.

Awasos immediately padded to the door and looked at me to go out. Feeding Tanya almost always led to bedroom games and our bear-wolf was decidedly prudish about being anywhere near us when we got frisky. Which was fine with us. She let him out then launched herself the fifteen feet from the door to the bed, pinning me to the mattress, fangs fully extended. Oh darn, held down by the hottest girl on the planet. Poor me!

Quite a bit later, I finally got dressed and took my furry friend for a ride to pick up more food for him and me. As I paid the steakhouse bill of $238.15 for takeout, I reflected that it was a damned good thing the Coven paid our room and board. Feeding two metabolisms that burned over 8000 calories a day each wasn’t cheap. Luckily, calories are easy to come by in our nation of fast food and oversized portions as long as you have the dinero.

Tanya had her laptop out, hooking it to a satellite phone for security. Once we were inside and eating our very rare porterhouse steaks, she proceeded to set up for a conference call. First she suspended a fine metal mesh netting from the ceiling, dropping it over us like a big steel mosquito net. She grounded it to the room’s heating and cooling unit, then turned on the laptop. The netting acted as a Faraday cage and the attached battery powered unit gave it a field that would prevent our electronic signals from escaping, at least in theory. The huge budget of the NSA, National Security Agency or ‘No Such Agency’ as it was once called, ensured that electronic privacy was an endangered, if not impossible, concept.

The Skype call went straight through to the Citadel, the Coven’s buried fortress of a headquarters that lurks under New York City. Built in tunnels, old and new, the Citadel is so interwoven with the Big Apple’s structure, including Wall Street, that any attack would threaten the City’s infrastructure.

A female human’s face filled the laptop’s screen, her manner brusque as she passed the call higher up the food chain. I didn’t remember her name but her face was familiar, she was one of the regular communication experts that handled our calls.

Lydia appeared next, seated next to Tanya’s grandmother, Elder Senka. Galina Demidova, Tanya’s mother was on Senka’s other side. Further behind them, manning a complex computer terminal was my friend Chet Aikens, whose technical abilities had made him extremely valuable to the Coven.

“Quite a mess,” Senka said by way of greeting. Her tone was deceptively droll. Anyone who didn’t know her might bristle at her words, which would be a bad impulse to give in to. First, disrespecting her in any way could easily be lethal; second, if you knew her you understood her tone to be a cover for anger at anything that threatened her family.

“What’s the damage?” Tanya asked.

“We passed a friendly tip to DHS, who took charge of the scene. Your hasty clean up left a lot of blood behind but it was so diluted and contaminated with lake water that it will be useless as evidence. General Creek’s people were able to cover up any other evidence that was left and impounded the weasels’ van,” Lydia reported. “Insurance will cover the ship’s damage as well as payoff the passengers whose cars got beat up,” Lydia reported.

“It was Langsford!,” I said.

“Most likely, Christian, but we need something concrete if we are to accuse him,” Senka said, dark brown eyes glittering.

“We’ve got ears out,” Galina said, “Someone will eventually talk about it and we’ll know who was behind it. In the meanwhile, you’re both okay?”

“We are fine Mother. There were only six of them. It was hardly a workout,” Tanya said, matter-of-fact.

“Don’t get cocky, Tanya. Six is twice the size of the normal kill team that weasels hire out,” Senka admonished.

Tanya glanced at me, then turned back to the laptop. “I did not mean to imply condescension, Grandmother, but it was not at all difficult,” she said. “When we are linked in combat it is as if we fight with the same mind, but two bodies.”

“How do you achieve this level of bonding?” Senka asked, a slight incline of her torso indicating extreme interest.

“It just happens…automatically,” Tanya said with an exquisite shrug.

“It ramps up as the danger level increases,” I threw in. Senka gave me a little wave that obviously indicated I should expand my comment.

“When we first smelled weasel, the bond instantly jumped to a higher level, but not quite full on. Then we saw them, they ran, and we were just suddenly operating as one unit in two different bodies.”

A small nod was Senka’s only reaction as she leaned back. I was learning to read her miniscule body language and I could tell she was fascinated. Above and beyond her protective instincts for one of her line, her interest in the two of us knew no bounds. She had always considered her granddaughter to be a vital part of the future of the Darkkin race, but I added a whole other dimension to the puzzle.

Lydia watched Senka to be sure she was done for the moment, then spoke. “We’re sending a couple of Guardian teams to back track your trail and see what they can shake out. But we want you to continue with your next assignment which will move you further away from Chicago,” the tiny vampire said. “You’re going north into the Upper Peninsula.”

Chapter 8

Michigan’s Upper Pennisula or U.P. as the locals call it has well over 16,000 miles of heavily forested terrain. At one time it was one of the largest copper mining regions in the world, but that died out with the end of the 1800’s. Logging is now the major industry although tourism has gained a foothold in the beautiful wilderness.

We had been driving for hours along Route 94, through what seemed at times to be uninhabited forest. Our mission was to follow up on a series of eyewitness reports that had popped up on the internet and caught the attention of the Coven’s powerful computers. I hadn’t believed my ears when Lydia had told us we were to track down the elusive Dogman of Michigan. I thought back to that conversation in the motel room, draped under metal mesh.

“Ah, what?” I had asked, stunned at her words which had taken a few seconds to penetrate. Then I continued on. “You want us to chase down a folktale?” I asked.

“Most folktales and folklore have some germ of truth somewhere in them,” Galina answered. “Michigan’s vast wilderness is highly popular with the werewolf crowd and a few sightings of the real deal over the years have resulted in some of the Dogman stories. We know the source of most of those, but what has our attention this time is a new set of very credible accounts, complete with video, that showed up on a cryptozoological website.”

“Don’t the local Packs take care of this kind of thing?” Tanya asked.

“Normally, yes, but in this case the reports come from the western part of the U.P., specifically a resort in the Hiawatha National forest. That region is off limits to all the Packs and they won’t or can’t investigate. In fact, the local council of Alphas requested help from the Coven, not realizing we were already interested,” Lydia answered.

“Why is it off limits?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Senka replied with a sardonic grin. “Absolutely none of our were contacts will discuss it.”

“Oooh, a mystery,” Tanya said in sudden understanding.

Even those of us on the other side of the curtain of mystery that covers the supernatural world don’t have all the answers. In my case, I don’t have many answers at all, I’m still learning the ropes of this strange reality that exists alongside the normal human experience.

Information is power and the Coven excels at collecting and managing information, so anything that could have this big an impact on the werewolf packs of Michigan demanded investigation.

“So what’s different about the Hiawatha forest?” I asked.

“That’s the billion dollar question,” Senka said. “The weres have their own legends and history. We’ve picked up hints from time to time of some individuals who have lived as weres for much greater spans of time than the rest of the species.”

“You mean there are Elder werewolves?” I asked. Generally, barring death by violence, weres could live to be 200- 300 years old, but unlike vampires, they did, eventually, die of old age.

“Possibly something like that,” she replied. “Maybe even approaching the age of an Elder vampire. It’s an area that I have interest in, so I keep some of my Guardians out looking for details.”

I glanced at Lydia who was frozen solid, no expression on her pixie-like face. Lydia dated mostly weres, which I had always believed to be her personal choice. Now I wondered if this cross species romancing was at the direction of Senka.

“The U.P. has a history of werewolf sightings that date back to early interactions with French fur trappers and the local natives. Loup Garou and that sort of thing,” Galina supplied.

Lydia spoke, “Although the Algonquian tribes that lived in that region didn’t seem to have any folktales of werewolves. They did, however, have their own monsters.”

***

My thoughts returned to the here and now as I drove up Route 94, heading northwest toward the town of Munising, which sits on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Despite the odd nature of our mission and the large number of unknowns, not to mention the recent assassination attempt, I was relaxed. The sun was just coming up, both Tanya and Awasos were sleeping and the wooded terrain I was driving through was so much like my home in upstate New York that I had to keep remembering I was in Michigan. The hardwood forest was sprouting the new green leaves of May, the maple and beech leaves unfurling and beginning to cover the recently bare limbs of their trees. Mixed in among the leafing trees were white and red pines, cedars and tamaracks, and occasionally I caught the scent of balsam on the breeze blowing through my partially opened window.

I usually drive to music, but the forest seemed to demand silent appreciation, so I kept the stereo off, pondering what mystery could keep werewolves from a pristine forest like this one.

We were heading to a resort lodge twenty-three miles south of Munising oddly named Copper Top Cabins. Two eyewitness accounts of the famous Dogman had popped up from separate people who stayed at or near the resort within the last month. The sightings were detailed on a website and blog dedicated to mysteries of Michigan. No newspaper articles or police reports existed to corroborate the reports but the three nights of the full moon had fallen during the time the sightings were purported to occur.

Details from one report to the other closely matched each other and accurately described true werewolf features. In both cases, the witnesses saw a giant wolf-like creature, not a wolf-man hybrid. Most werewolves could, with time, learn to stop their transformation in the beast-man(woman) state, but the more common form was very similar to a timber wolf, although about two or three times larger.

Both described dark brown coloration, jaws and musculature that seemed excessive even for a giant wolf and an extremely rapid rate of movement. No one had been attacked which lent even more support to the werewolf theory as killing and eating humans is severely frowned on by the werewolf society.

The one set of witnesses that stayed at the resort had reported the sighting to the cabins owners, getting almost no reaction in the process. The other witness had been camping nearby and rushed back to his vehicle for safety. On his way out of the forest he stopped at the Copper Top to warn the inhabitants and reported being met with disbelief and ridicule. I was interested to meet the folks who ran the place.

Lydia had set up a reservation for one of the five cabins, three of which were already full. The resort also had a main lodge with eight rooms for rent. Each cabin had a small efficiency kitchen, so I bought lots of groceries when we got to Munising, then gassed up the Tahoe before heading south on the National Forest Development Road number 13. We pulled into the resort just before noon, Awasos and I getting out of the SUV, letting Tanya stay semi-comatose in the back seat.

A squat two-story wood and timber lodge stood at the end of the dirt and gravel driveway, with two of the five cabins visible just back and to the left of it. A dirt road circled out from the better graveled, main driveway, heading past each of the cabins and on behind the lodge where I presumed the rest of the cabins were hidden.

“Holy shit!” a voice proclaimed from behind me. Both Awasos and I whipped around to find a very tall, middle-aged blond man staring at us from the center of a mound of firewood, splitting ax clutched in his big hands like a weapon. He stared at Awasos in a mixture of undisguised fear and interest.

“Oh, don't worry!” I said, “He won't hurt anyone. He's just big is all.”

The Viking-looking guy glanced at me once before turning his gaze back to Awasos who immediately came over and sat by my legs, letting his big tongue loll out of his mouth like all friendly dogs do.

“Big? My feet are big! That, my friend, is huge!” he said, his voice deep to match his size.

“I'm Chris Gordon. My wife and I have a reservation for one of your cabins. This is Awasos,” I said.

“Welcome Chris Gordon and Awasos. I'm Garth Boklund. My wife, Quinby and I run this place or like to think we do. Actually, it runs us.” he said as he approached his voice. Up close I judged him at six-three or six-four, probably 230 or more in weight. His big mitt swallowed mine and squeezed.

A lot of big men will have gentle handshakes, like they have less to prove. Garth's wasn't gentle. He squeezed hard, or at least what I would have considered hard several years ago. I squeezed back, a bit.

His face went white and his eyes widened, then after a second or two he caved, quickly clapping his other hand over mine in a non-verbal surrender.

“Well Chris Gordon, you've got a hell of a grip! Not to mention an oversized dog with wolf in his bloodline if I don't miss my guess. Say, where's your wife?” he asked, trying to see into the Tahoe's super tinted windows.

“She's sleeping in the back. She was up all night driving. I’ll just get us checked in then I'll wake her over at the cabin.”

The door behind the driver’s opened on the SUV and Tanya appeared, one hand covering a yawn. That hand hid her fangs from view which was good, but from the look on Garth’s face I don’t think it would have mattered if they were in full view.

“Garth, this is my wife, Tatiana,” I said by way of introduction.

“Er, nice to meet you Mrs. Gordon,” he said, eyes busy taking in her details.

“Garth, where do I check in?” I asked, forcing him to reluctantly drag his attention away from Tanya.

“Right through that door. Quinby ought to be in there,” he replied.

The big wooden door led me into a tiny office area complete with the obligatory rack of tourist maps and brochures, a coffee station and a hotel reservation desk that was manned or womaned by Garth’s female counterpart. Close to six feet tall, I judged Quinby to be in her mid-forties, blond, attractive and statuesque. She looked up as I came in, her face looking startled by my appearance. Or probably my eyes. Either way she recovered after a second to greet me with a slightly reserved smile. I smiled back, introduced myself and told her Garth had sent me in to check in.

“Well, that’s probably best. Every time that man tries to handle check in or reservations he leaves disaster in his wake,” she said shaking her head while still studying my face. Yup, it was the eyes again.

She was dressed simply in a sweater and jeans, but she fairly dripped with jewelry. That in and of itself wasn’t odd (come on, I live in New York City where almost every woman drips with jewelry), it was that none of it was gold or silver. Wood beads and carved ivory made up most of the necklaces and bracelets, with small stones and gems littered among the more organic material.

I handed her my Coven credit card and filled out the little slip of paper that seems to be mandatory for all small inns, B&B’s and motels. After writing out the details of the Tahoe and signing the credit card slip, I was handed the key to cabin four.

“Every cabin has an outdoor firepit and grill. Help yourself to the mountain of wood that Garth is always playing around in. Oh and when you check out, the cabin needs to be broom swept. How long are you staying?” she asked.

“We reserved it for four nights, but we might stay longer if that’s alright?” I replied.

She opened her mouth to reply but was interrupted by a voice from the doorway behind her.

“Mom, I finished the laundry,” came through, just before another blond head poked out. “Oh!” said the girl as she realized I was standing there. “Ohh!” was the follow up after a second.

“Mr. Gordon, this is my daughter Britta. She and her sister Erika provide some of the extra hands needed to keep this place going.

I have a unique ability to tell the age of a vampire to within a year or so with a single glance. It absolutely doesn’t work on young humans in their late teens to early twenties. Britta was a very pretty, blue-eyed younger version of her mother and could have been as old as twenty or possibly as young as sixteen. It was difficult to tell, which probably caused no end of problems for her parents. As tall as me and built like her mother, she would be a target for every male from pimple faced high-schoolers to middle-aged men. She had sort of frozen up, eyes wide like a deer in the headlights.

“Britta, where the hell did you go?” another female voice came through from what had to be the family’s private living quarters.

The girl that came through was Britta’s clone in every detail, except for the annoyed expression on her face.

“Erika, I’m guessing?” I asked the girl’s mother.

“Yes, my twins,” she answered me, smiling slightly at the surprised expression on Erika’s face.

Erika’s surprised expression changed to a big smile, while Britta continued to stare at me without comment.

“Girls, Mr. Gordon and his wife are staying in cabin four for most of the week,” she said, emphasizing the word wife. The twins looked at her in unison then back at me.

“Where is your wife, Mr. Gordon?” Quinby asked.

“It’s Chris and she’s outside talking to your husband, keeping an eye on our…dog,” I answered.

Just then the door behind me opened and Tanya came through followed by Garth. The expressions on the three Boklund womens’ faces flashed through a series of changes, almost too quick to catch. Quinby took in Tanya at a glance, her face briefly registering first the dismay that most attractive women feel when they first meet my vampire. Faced with her literally inhuman beauty, most females are intimidated. Then Quinby’s face took in her husband’s body language and her features settled into a look that promised doom to Garth in the near future. I’ve seen that one before as well. Then she took another look at Tanya and her eyes widened, then hardened.

The twins stared at Tanya, eyes wide, then Britta looked away, concentrating on something on the desk, while Erika’s eyes continued to take in the details of Tanya’s clothes.

Chapter 9

Tanya was wearing designer jeans, some kind of half-boot which I know cost a lot of money and a white blouse with a blue shawl like thing over it, all in fashion, all expensive. Living in New York city, with unlimited wealth, it’s natural that Tanya would be a fashionista. My own clothes are only slightly less likely to be current, but that’s due to the efforts of both Lydia and Tanya to keep me presentable (in their estimation). I just wear what’s handy. Lydia spent some time trying to educate me, but eventually just gave up and settled for removing anything she deemed out of fashion, although I do have a secret stash of old sweat shirts she hasn’t found yet.

I introduced Tanya to the three women, collected some extra towels from Quinby, then ushered my vampire out of the tiny office. Garth started to follow but was brought up short by his wife’s voice.

We escaped to the Tahoe, driving over to cabin four while Awasos ran along beside us. Being as it was the middle of her sleep time, Tanya immediately climbed into the queen bed and fell back to sleep. I made sure all the blinds were closed, then unpacked the SUV. Putting most of the groceries away, I left out the big party packs of hot dogs and hamburgers, putting a dozen of each on the gas grill that came with the cabin. Awasos and I would snack on those while studying the layout of the resort.

The cabins formed a five part arc around the shoreline of a tiny pond that had no name on any maps. In the middle of the arc was the main lodge, office, and living quarters of the Boklund family. The pond was small enough that it hadn’t been visible from the front, road-side, of the lodge. Cabin four was out near the end of the arc, only empty cabin five beyond it. Cabins one thru three all showed signs of occupancy. Cars were parked at one and two; a pair of kayaks with paddles and gear were jumbled around number three. There was a small beach in front of the lodge with a couple of beat up canoes and an aluminum row boat parked on the sand.

During the short time it took to grill up the grease burgers and frankfurters enough activity occurred for me to get some idea of our neighbors. The screen door on cabin one burst open and a small, dark-haired boy of about seven or eight came flying out, a plastic gun in one hand and a drink box in the other. Immediately, he laid down an impressive display of suppressive fire, blasting flashing lights and recorded machine gun sounds at a crow flying by, two dragonflies, a squirrel sitting in a nearby tree and a small pine stump next to the shoreline. Turning our way he froze when he spotted the massive wolf sitting next to me, his right hand coming to rest on the bumper of the black BMW SUV that was parked in front of his cabin. I noticed that the BMW wore dealer plates.

“Whoa!” he said, frozen while his hind brain registered the apex predator a hundred yards away. Awasos’s calm dog-like demeanor must have convinced the boy that he wasn’t in much danger because he unfroze and started our way. When he was about thirty yards from us, he suddenly stopped, watching us awkwardly, unable to look away, but too shy to come any closer.

“Hi”, I ventured.

“Hi” he replied, his eyes flicking from Awasos to me and back again. “Is that your dog?”

“Yup, his name is Awasos,” I replied. “He won’t hurt you. I’m Chris.”

“He’s really big,” he said, his eyes huge as he took in the monster canine at my side.

“Yes he is and he eats a ton,” I said, making my point by tossing a pair of grilled hotdogs to Awasos. The franks disappeared in a single snap of bear trap jaws, big tongue wiping his lips.

“He looks more like a wolf than a dog,” the boy observed.

“Well, you’re pretty sharp, because he has some wolf in him,” I said.

“My mom says I’m smart for my age,” he replied, then added as an afterthought, “I’m Billy.”

“BILLY!” a female voice yelled from his cabin. A petit and very pregnant woman of about thirty appeared in the door to cabin one. She wore the harried expression of an overworked mother.

“I’m right here Mom,” he yelled back.

His mother took in the sight of her son talking to a strange man with a huge wolf-dog and fear blossomed on her face.

“You probably better head back to your mom, Billy,” I said.

He understood, having already read his mother’s expression.

“Billy come here!” she said, although his feet were already moving in her direction.

“See you later, mister,” he said to me with a nod to Awasos.

“Later, Billy,” I said, hoping his mother wasn’t too creeped out.

Billy disappeared into his cabin, but at that moment the door on cabin two opened and a portly bearded man backed out holding an assortment of gear. Somewhere around sixty years old, his half-glasses were perched on his nose in the middle of a face surrounded by gray beard and mustache. His arms held a fly rod, fish creel, a butterfly net and a soft cooler, while a camera and binoculars hung on straps around his neck. His attire was a mixture of LL Bean and Orvis.

Stumbling out of the door, he completely failed to notice us as he dragged his stuff in the direction of the beach. A male voice called to him from the cabin’s interior.

“Gordon, did you grab the lunch cooler?”

“Yes Mitch,” he called back, without looking up. As he continued to haul his stuff toward one of the canoes another man appeared in the door to cabin two. Mitch was taller, also probably a few years younger than Gordon and dressed neatly in cargo shorts, a light weight sun-blocking shirt and a fly fishing vest with hiking boots on his feet. He was slimmer than Gordon, in obviously good shape. He also noticed us immediately. Like everyone else he froze in place for a second, but came to life when I tossed another hot dog to Awasos.

“Hello there,” he said.

“Howdy, looks like a good day for fishing,” I replied, nodding at his friend who was attempting to get their stuff into the canoe.

Mitch headed over, studying us curiously as he came. The cheeseburgers were done so I started to spatula them onto the open buns I had laid out.

“You want both mayo and ketchup?” I asked my furry friend while Mitch closed the distance between us. Awasos nose butted me in response which meant yes.

“That’s a wolf,” Mitch stated as he got closer.

“Hybrid,” I answered, “His father was a wolf.”

“What was the mother?” he asked, awe in his voice as he got close enough to really understand the size of the beast that was impatiently waiting for his burgers.

“Kodiak bear,” I replied. “I’m Chris, this is Awasos.”

“I’m Mitch, that’s Gordon,” he said, pointing at his friend who had finally seen us and was now headed our way. “He must weigh close to two hundred?”

Weres and vampires have denser muscles and bones than humans, another effect of the virus’s that create them. Awasos , in wolf form, weighed much more than a regular wolf his size would weigh.

“A bit more than that, actually,” I answered. Gordon arrived at our location and introductions were made. Both men had trouble taking their eyes off my furry friend.

I started to hand burgers to Awasos, who carefully took them from my hand, consuming each in a couple snaps of his jaws. The two men were fascinated, studying him in a professorial/scientific type way.

“Hybridization can result in larger offspring than either parent,” Gordon noted, reinforcing the academic image I was getting.

“Were the parents big?” Mitch asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said, thinking of the Fenris wolf and the Kodiak female that had birthed Awasos.

“You guys scientists or professors, or something?” I asked, biting into my own burger.

“That obvious?” Mitch laughed. Of the two, he definitely had the better social skills. “I teach biology and zoology at the University of Michigan, Gordon teaches entomology.”

“That explains the butterfly net,” I said, understanding that Gordon would probably rather catch bugs than trout.

They both laughed at that. Neither showed an inclination to try and pat Awasos which almost everyone who met him wanted to do.

For his part, Awaso was more interested in the flow of burgers from my hand to his mouth.

“So is this like a famous trout pond or something?” I asked.

Mitch laughed, looking a bit chagrined. “No, but the Boklunds tell me that there are trout in it. I think Gordon will have more luck than I.”

Gordon nodded. “I think I may have seen a Somatochlora hineana on the pond yesterday,” he said excitedly.

I must have looked puzzled because Mitch explained. “ Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly. Very rare, endangered.”

“Yes, yes, yes. A large dark dragonfly with emerald eyes and two yellow stripes oblique on the thorax,” Gordon said, seriously.

“Is that why you guys came here? Hunting dragonflies?” I asked.

They exchanged a glance and I realized something new about them. They were a couple. I hadn’t seen that coming. My gay-dar isn’t very well developed; it generally takes me a while to figure out what some people notice in a glance.

“No, the fishing and the insect collecting are side interests,” Mitch said, after coming to some decision.

“Our real hobby is cryptozoology,” Gordon said in a rush. They both watched to gauge my reaction.

“Oh, like Bigfoot and Loch Ness and the Tasmanian Tiger,” I said, surprised.

“Well, yes, basically. You see, we look for unknown species of animals. Legends and sightings, while colorful and often graphic, usually have some grain of truth buried deep inside them. Lake monsters, like Loch Ness or New York’s Champ, are probably some kind of eel that hasn’t been documented. There are theories that Bigfoot is an extraordinarily intelligent and large great ape,” Gordon lectured.

“So what’s around here? Bigfoot?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“There have been reports over the years, but no, we’re investigating reports of Michigan’s Dogman,” Mitch said, with just a trace of sheepishness.

“Oh, right, I’ve heard of that one. Wasn’t there a show about American Werewolves or something. The Beast of Bray Road and all that?”

“That’s right. Michigan has had all kinds of sightings, but there have been a couple of recent ones right here at this resort!” Gordon answered. He was totally into his passion, completely serious about investigating cryptids, but Mitch seemed to be slightly more sensitive to how this hobby might be perceived.

“That’s why my pal here caught your eye?” I asked.

Mitch laughed. “Chris, Awasos here would catch any eye, but yes, he is an amazing specimen. Do you think we could cast some of his tracks?”

They really didn’t need my permission, all they had to do was wait till Awasos left tracks in the sand at the beach, but it was nice of them to ask.

“What do you say pal? Can we leave them some good tracks?” I asked the canine in question.

He finished off the current burger, his fifth I think, then trotted over to the sandy shore of the pond in front of us. He pounded into the soft grains, leaving four perfect tracks, then stepped deliberately in a walking pattern for five or six feet.

Mitch and Gordon watched the performance incredulously.

“I’d say that’s a yes. He left you a direct register set when he stepped into his own tracks, so you can get stride length then compare to his actual hip-to-shoulder ratio,” I added.

“Are you a crypto tracker too, Chris?” Mitch asked, suddenly suspicious.

I laughed. “No, I’ve mostly been a criminal or lost person tracker, but I do track regular animals from time to time.”

“Oh, you a cop?” Gordon asked.

“Used to be, then a consultant to Homeland Security. Now I work for a private corporation, troubleshooting and security work.” I said.

“That was one of the most amazing displays of intelligence in a canine that I’ve ever seen,” Mitch said, still staring at Awasos.

“Yeah, he’s a smart one alright. He’ll con me out of my burgers if I don’t watch him,” I said, hurrying to eat my second as Awasos scarfed his sixth.

“His coloration is unusual,” Gordon noted.

Awasos looks almost like someone laid a dark brown blanket turned to form a diamond on top of a wheat-colored wolf. The point of one corner of the brown ‘blanket’ comes up over the top of his skull to end just above and between his eyes. The other end of the diamond ends at his tail. Addition brown points come down the top of each leg in a very uniform pattern. It looks very, very similar to the coloration of my Damnedthing friend Okwari, who had died protecting me and then, I believe, may have been reborn as Awasos.

“Yes, it is somewhat unusual, but then he’s a very unique fellow,” I said, starting my third burger.

“Are burgers good for him?” Mitch asked.

“Ya know I told him the same thing….burgers would clog his arteries. He wasn’t interested,” I joked. “Honestly, his vet says it’s okay in moderation, so when we’re on vacation we live a little.”

“Just a man and his dog…er..wolf-dog,” Mitch laughed.

Actually, were-bear-wolf, I thought to myself.

“Man, wife and wolf-dog,” I corrected.

“Oh?”

“Yes, Tanya did most of the driving to get here, right through the night, so she’s taking a nap. You’ll meet her later I should think,” I said.

“Are burgers good for you?” Gordon asked, watching me pick up my fourth.

“Well it goes back to that live it up on vacation bit. I also have a pretty fast metabolism,” I said.

“Well you’re not overweight,” Mitch said, eyeing me in a way that suddenly made me self-conscious.

“Yeah he reminds me of Jake from the cabin next door….always eating,” Gordon said.

“Oh yeah?” I questioned.

“Two brothers…here to hunt spring turkey from the way they tell it,” Mitch explained. “But come to think of it they never seem to bring any turkeys back with them. Anyway, Jake is the younger brother and he’s still got that youthful metabolism that lets him eat anything. That will go away someday, ya know?”

Awasos got tired of looking at my two remaining burgers, his being all gone. With a dart of his head, he twisted his jaws to snap up one of the burgers. I beat him to it, grabbing both of them.

“Whoa! You’re fast!” Gordon said, his eyes large.

“It’s a game we play” I said, smirking at Awasos, then relenting and tossing him my sixth burger, keeping the fifth in my other hand. “That’s it though, you’re all done Mister.”

He scarfed down the bundle of bread, meat and cheese, then laydown with his head on his front feet.

“Gordon, we better get out on the pond if we’re going to catch that dragonfly. They’re most active during the heat of the day and all,” Mitch said. It was odd to hear my last name as someone else’s first.

His shorter, older partner gave me a quick little wave goodbye and headed in a bee-line for the canoe. Mitch shook his head at Gordon’s lack of social graces and thanked me and Awasos for such an interesting meeting, then followed his friend.

They paddled out onto the pond with more skill than I would have thought, Mitch guiding the canoe from the back while Gordon looked everywhere and anywhere for his prized dragonfly.

The day had warmed to the mid-seventies, and I found myself worried about the remaining uncooked food. There isn’t a bacteria currently in existence that can harm me, not after the V squared virus has had its way with my physiology, but old habits die hard and no one really wants to eat spoiled hamburger, even if it’s harmless. So I hauled the leftovers inside to the fridge.

Chapter 10

Awasos was lying by the firepit gnawing one of his truck tire chew toys. Lydia had them custom made in a recycling center from steel belted tractor trailer tires. Each tire would make a dozen of the rolled and twisted chews, which was good, because despite their awful smell, Awasos loved to tear them to shreds and each one only lasted an hour or so. Black chunks of rubber were strewn about the cabin site like an interstate blowout.

I was just coming back outside when I heard the screen door from Billy’s cabin slam. Turning I found a man in jeans and a polo shirt headed our way. He looked close to forty years old, but his thirties hadn’t been kind to him. His hair was thinning and the beginnings of a paunch was forming on what had, at one time, been an athletic frame. He sucked on a cigarette as he purposely headed toward us, his body language aggressive.

He came right up to about ten feet away, stopping suddenly when he spotted Awasos lying on the ground on the other side of the cider block fire pit. Jabbing one hand in my pal’s direction he opened his mouth and pissed me off.

“Keep that thing and yourself away from my wife and kid!” he spit out. “If you can’t, for any reason, I will,” he added, raising his untucked polo shirt to reveal the butt of a snub revolver. Part of my mind automatically catalogued it as a Ruger SP101, .357 magnum.

The rest of my mind was suddenly seeing red.

“Listen, mister, Awasos here wouldn’t harm your kid or your wife if they were jumping up and down on his tail. You on the other hand, he doesn’t like at all!” I replied in a quiet voice that wasn’t quite my own. He looked at Awasos and caught the flash of lava red that rolled through the extremely alert eyes of the giant wolf.

He stepped back involuntarily, his right hand touching the butt of his gun.

“Billy seems like a good kid, and I get the whole protective dad thing, but I still get the feeling that you’re a giant douche bag. But for Billy’s sake I’ll give you a little advice…shooting Awasos always pisses him off, and frankly, it sends me right through the roof!” I said, voice still pitched low. The God Tear necklace around my neck warmed in warning at my anger.

“Chris, what’s up?” a soft silky voice said from the door to our cabin. Tanya stood framed in the doorway, wearing one of my long dark tee shirts and nothing else. Even freshly woken her appearance stunned our vistor.

“Just an asshole threatening to shoot Awasos,” I said.

Suddenly she was wide awake and full vampire, her blue eyes staring through Billy’s father like laser beams. She went from sleepy centerfold to supernatural killing machine in less than an eyeblink, a fact which registered deep in the primitive survival center of his human brain.

“That would be….ill advised,” she said, her voice pitched in a tone I recognized as part of her vocal talent.

He backed off three quick and awkward steps, driven by an unconscious impulse to get away. The point where his conscious mind asserted itself was crystal clear to any observer, as he stumbled to a sudden stop, halting his panicked retreat. He frowned and his fear partially changed to anger. “This isn’t over,” he said, storming off.

I knew his type. Small town athlete grows up to become small town car dealer who never grows up to being a father and lives an angry life of self-destruction. He likely drank a lot, cheated on his wife and ignored his kid. Almost a cliché if it wasn’t for the fact that every town had at least one of him.

“Making new friends?” my vampire said, still framed in the doorway but back to looking like my personal gift from God.

I got up and headed toward the cabin. Billy’s dad reached his own place, slamming the door and yelling at his family. Arms circling her lithe body I kissed her deeply. Another door slam at cabin one broke our kiss. Asshole was now headed toward the main lodge.

“I’m hungry, but I think we better put off my dinner. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’re going to get a visit from management,” Tanya said.

“Hey I did make friends with the guys in the canoe,” I said, defensively, waving in the direction of the pond.

“I know, I heard. Two out of three is a big improvement,” she said with a sly laugh.

***

Garth Boklund made his way to our cabin, reluctance written on every part of him. He was followed closely by Billy’s dad.

“Ah, Chris, Tanya. Mr. Cleveland here has told us that you threatened him and his family. You’ll understand that we can’t have that,” the big blond said when he got close.

“Did Mr. Cleveland tell you that he flashed a gun at us? Did he tell you that Awasos never left our cabin?”

“Ah no.. he didn’t” Garth started, but was interrupted by Cleveland.

“That’s a fucking lie! I don’t have a gun on me!” he shouted, pulling up his shirt to show an absence of weapons. His stomach was flabby.

“Garth, we’ve been minding our own business since we got here. His son, Billy introduced himself earlier but never came near Awasos. Mr. Cleveland here stormed up a few minutes ago, threatened to shoot our dog and us if we didn’t stay away from his family. His gun is probably in his cabin,” I answered.

Garth turned and looked at Cleveland with raised eyebrows. “You got a gun in your cabin Mr. Cleveland?”

“What I have or don’t have in my cabin is none of your damn business! What is your business is this wild animal running loose in your resort!” Cleveland snarled.

“We can’t have dogs threatening people, Chris,” Garth said, apologetically.

Tanya spoke up from her seat at the picnic table. “Mr. Boklund, would you be so kind as to call the local sheriff. We need to file a complaint about a threat with a deadly weapon. What kind of gun was it Chris?” she asked.

“Ruger SP 101, .357,” I answered. “The police can check their records to see if he has it on his permit. Should be a Michigan permit ‘cause his dealer plates are Michigan tags. What’s the dealership name? Mirris Motors? I can look that up and find out the town,” I said, pulling out my iPhone.

“You weren’t even here when he saw it!” Cleveland said to Tanya.

“So you did pull a gun!” Garth said, now angry.

“I didn’t pull it…just showed him I had it was all. No law against owning a gun to protect yourself from dangerous animals,” he said, obviously including us with the animals.

“What’s going on?” Mitch’s voice said from the beach. The two professors had just beached their canoe and were watching our little drama unfold anxiously.

“A disagreement Professor Chance,” Garth replied.

“Oh, you mean when Mr. Cleveland threatened Chris with a gun?” Mitch answered.

“What did you see, Mitch?” Garth asked.

“Well, we had just paddled out on the water after meeting Chris and Awasos. Didn’t get a chance to meet you, ma’am,” Mitch said, directing the last at Tanya with a nod. “Then Cleveland marched up like Billy the Kid and started yelling. He lifted his shirt and had a gun under it.”

“You’re making that up! There’s no way you could see that from the pond!” Cleveland yelled.

Mitch put his hand on the binoculars and held them up. “Gordon was studying some water-striders, so I was watching Awasos through the binoculars, so yeah, I did see. By the way, the dog never left Chris’s side and he never threatened anyone.”

“You people are making me out to be the bad guy! I’m just protecting my son and pregnant wife.”

“Your son was polite, kept his distance and was never in any danger. Your wife called him back from the door of your cabin,” I said.

“Mr.Cleveland, I’ve heard enough. Lock your gun in your cabin or your car. If I see you with it or hear of anymore waving it around, you’ll be asked to leave. Mrs. Gordon, did you still want me to call the sheriff?”

Tanya pretended to think about it, while my link told me she was more bemused by being called Mrs. Gordon. “No, Mr. Boklund, I think we’ll be okay if the Clevelands just leave us alone.”

I happened to glance at the main lodge and saw all three Boklund women lined up, watching the drama. I started to look away, then did a double take. They were holding hands, but it was their their expressions that caught my eye. Britta was looking anxious, while her sister Erika looked intrigued and even smiled when she saw me look their way. Quinby, on the other hand, looked determined and deadly serious, like she was holding guns, not hands. It was such an incongruent scene that it caught my attention.

Garth directed Cleveland back to his cabin then turned to us. “It doesn’t sound like your pet did anything wrong, but we’ve already had our share of problems with wolves and dogs. So you’re gonna have to leash him.”

“Really? Here in the middle of a national forest?” I asked, angry.

“Really, Mr. Gordon, I have a business to run, one that depends on my guests staying safe,” he said, in a level but firm tone.

The logical part of my brain came to his rescue, realizing that he was very much right. The back of the Tahoe had a single length of chain, included for the purpose of providing just this sort of camouflage. I dug it out.

“That’s what you leash him with?” Gordon asked. All three men were studying the length of super heavy duty tow chain with almost identical incredulous expressions.

“Well it’s the lightest that will hold him,” I answered, wrapping the length of tow chain around one of the cement cabin piers that held up the little porch. Truth be told, the chain would never hold him, but how do you explain that the offspring of the Fenris wolf was gonna break any chain you could find. “However, I’m a bit worried about the pier.”

“You’re kidding? Right?” Mitch asked.

“Not entirely. See, he won’t go anywhere if we’re nearby, but if we, say, went to the lodge and he got anxious, then he might pull free. It’s honestly something of a nightmare trying to keep him tied up….it’s a damn good thing he doesn’t like to run like some mutts,” I explained.

I snap linked the chain to his heavy collar, ignoring the look he was giving me. We both knew that I would let him off as soon as everyone left, but he still liked to put on a show.

“Wow, he’s really expressive! I swear you can read every expression on his face!” Garth said. Awasos’s current look was less than complimentary to me.

“Ohhh, yeah, you’re on his shit list!” Mitch said.

Tanya strolled over to Awasos and crouched down, somehow managing to maintain her modesty as she wrapped her arms round his massive neck. There was quite a bit of highly toned leg showing though. Garth didn’t appear to be heading anywhere soon, until a loud throat clearing from his wife caught his attention.

“Well, I’m sorry for this Chris, but you’ll understand I hope?” he said, his eyes coming back to me for a moment, then flicked back to Tanya or maybe just her legs. “Ma’am,” he said, with a nod.

He started to turn away then came back two quick steps till he was close enough to speak quietly and not have Mitch and Gordon hear.

“Quinby was very worried when I was escorting Cleveland here to talk to you,” he said.

“Well the guy does seem to have a temper,” I answered, puzzled by his comment.

“It wasn’t Mr. Cleveland she was worried about,” he said glancing at Tanya, Awasos and back to me. He held my gaze for a moment, conveying some message of warning, then left.

When Garth was about halfway back to the lodge and his waiting women, Mitch spoke.

“That was interesting,” he said. “Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m Mitchell Chance and this is Gordon Stanger.”

“Oh, this is my wife Tatiana,” I said, belatedly.

“But you two will call me Tanya,” she said with a smile, shaking both their hands.

Chapter 11

The professors went back to their cabin and we went into ours. I lounged on the bed while Tanya dressed in black jeans, black shirt and cute little hiking boots.

“Okay, there is something odd about the Boklunds, particularly Quinby,” I said.

“I think she’s a witch,” Tanya said.

“Well sweetheart, you have that effect on other women – they get intimidated.”

“No, Chris, I mean that I believe she is a real witch,” Tanya said, giving me the look she reserves for when I’m being slow.

“Oh…why do you say that?”

“See, I know that you look at them and see one quarter of a Swedish volleyball team, but I’m not blinded by blonde hair and big boobs. I’ve seen quite a few witches during my life, plus it’s one of those feelings I get like I’ve seen this before only I haven’t. Like déjà vu.”

“Like your mother encountered something while you were unborn?” I asked.

“Yes, precisely. One or two of her necklaces seem familiar in a witch way,” she said, working her thick midnight black hair into a ponytail.

“Well, if I scan her aura I can probably tell right away,” I said, “and I was thinking more like the Swedish National Bikini Team.

“That’s a good idea,” my vampire answered. “We could use a big bunch of ice, don’t you think?” she said with raised eyebrows.

The ice machine had been near the office

“And Chris?” she asked then continued at my lifted brow, “No one has a National Bikini Team.”

“Well men everywhere would agree that that’s a damn shame. But the ice is a good idea. What are you going to do?”

“Awasos and I are going for a little nature hike,” she said as she dug a set of blades from her suitcase.

The sun was still pretty high but she seemed fully awake and the woods would be shaded. They headed into the thick woods near the cabin a few minutes later, just a girl and her oversized wolf-dog.

I turned from watching them go and spotted movement by the massive woodpile. A man I hadn’t seen before was standing, watching them head into the woods, then he looked me over. Middle-aged, maybe late fifties, around my height of five-ten, wearing stained jeans, workboots, a dark tee shirt and heavy gloves. His hair was black and his eyes dark, face tanned and weathered. As soon as he noticed that I had noticed him, he went back to work, a partial cord of neatly stacked wood giving testament to his efforts at organizing Garth’s mess.

Watching him as I walked toward the lodge, ice bucket in hand, I waited to see if he would look up, hoping to start a conversation. My hopes went unfounded as he carefully avoided looking my way. I opened my Sight, that way of looking at the world and seeing what everyone else misses. His aura was the normal blue of solid human, but something about him tugged at my awareness, a little pull of memory or recognition.

The big industrial ice maker was just outside the door to the office, tucked under the eaves of the roof where it was accessible to both cabin guests and any guests of the lodge. I shoveled the bucket full with the ice scoop, trying to catch sight of any of the Boklunds through the screen door. I could hear them inside, but none of them wondered through my view point. A scuff of shoe behind me brought me around. Erika was coming out another door marked ”laundry” with a basket of clean towels and she pulled up short when she saw me, a big smile lighting up her face.

“Finding everything okay, Mr. Gordon?” she asked, with perhaps more interest than most teen-aged employees would muster.

“Yeah, thanks Erika,” I managed, while scanning her with my Sight. Her blue aura was flecked with black and twin pools of deeper black stained the necklace and bracelet she was wearing.

“Well, if you need anything, or any help at all, just let me know,” she said, her smile warm enough that even I got the hint. She stepped forward and brushed something off my sleeve.

“You had a bug on your arm,” she explained.

“Erika! Your sister is waiting for those towels!” Quinby said from the office doorway behind me. I had heard her approach so I wasn’t startled like Erika was. The pretty blonde jumped at her mother’s sharp words, then with a frown thrown at her mother and a final smile for me she turned and headed into the lodge.

“Mr. Gordon, I told my husband that we should return your money and send you packing but he insisted that we let you stay. But I will warn you – I know what she is and I will protect my family!”

Quinby’s aura was even more flecked with black then her daughter’s and her jewelry all inky pools of stored witchy power. I don’t like witches much, nothing good had come from any of my encounters with them.

“Well, ma’am, it seems that everyone at this resort is full of warnings and threats…not the happy, relaxing place your website proclaims it to be,” I told her. “And just to be fair, we know what you are as well, so I’ll tell you this. We are no threat to you and your family, or anyone here for that matter. But if someone attacks us, well then ma’am, I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen anything like us.”

She digested that for a moment, her arms crossed under her rather impressive chest, eyes angry, but with a touch of worry. “There are things in this forest that aren’t impressed with her kind, things that only stay away because of me. You would do well to cut your stay short and get away from here!”

She turned and left, leaving me with confused thoughts and a bucket of ice. I turned and started back to the cabin, noting that woodpile man wasn’t there anymore. However, an older model Jeep Cherokee pulled into the resort and pulled up in front of cabin three. The driver was a big guy, six-three, maybe two hundred and thirty pounds. Close cropped brown hair that was just beginning to salt and pepper. I judged him at thirty-five years old and also figured him for a cop based on his careful, sharp-eyed scan of the resort. He noticed me right away, studying me in the direct way that men in authority will. The passenger was a decent sized six or six-one, probably a healthy one ninety in weight. He looked frazzled, tired and distracted. He had the same brown hair as the driver, but without any gray, maybe in his early thirties. In fact, it was quickly obvious that the two were related, likely brothers. They were very alike aside from the size difference, and the fact that the younger one was a werewolf.

It’s just something I can tell, some ability that comes with the rest of my freaky package. I can always tell vampires and weres at a glance. My Sight showed his blue aura to be riddled with green splotches, the sign of the LV virus. He was fairly new to the condition.

The werewolf brother didn’t notice me, seemingly self-absorbed as he pulled a couple of shotgun cases from the back seat of the Jeep. Both brothers were dressed in camouflage, but it all had a brand new, fresh-from-the-store look to it.

Apparently, I showed too much interest as the older one’s hard-eyed stare got colder and he hustled his brother into their cabin, his sharp eyes flicking from me to the Tahoe and back. The Jeep’s plates were Michigan and like Cleveland’s BMW, the plate holder told me the name of the dealer who had sold it. Steve Dimer Chevrolet-Jeep-Honda.

My iPhone had enough signal to tell me that the Dimer dealership was in Grayling, Michigan right on I-75 in Crawford County, Northern Michigan. Grayling seemed pretty small so I checked for Crawford County’s sheriff department and found a PDF with the previous year’s sheriff’s report. It came complete with a staff photo. In the back row, on the left side, dressed in emergency response team tactical gear with a stoic look on his aviator sunglass covered face, was the older of the two brothers.

Chapter 12

I noticed Britta walking along the cabin road and it looked like she was headed for the same destination I was – cabin three. As soon as she saw me she swiveled and headed to the professors’ cabin, her voice loud enough to hear as she asked if they needed anything. Then with a glance my way she headed back to the lodge, a slight air of frustration about her. Interesting.

The older brother answered the door when I knocked, filling the doorway aggressively.

“Yeah, something I can do for you?” he asked, wearing his professional law enforcement look, one he had probably practiced in front of a mirror early in his career. Up close he was younger than I had thought, maybe early thirties, despite the premature gray in his hair.

“Yeah, are you insane?” I asked, in the same pleasant way I might ask to borrow a screwdriver.

That set him back for an instant, than anger rushed to the surface. “What? Who the hell are you?”

“Oops, forgot to introduce myself – I’m Chris, from cabin four. But what I’m wondering is if the two of you are insane – ‘cause starting tomorrow night we’re going to have three days of a full moon,” I said, pleasantly.

The cop’s face went white and he fell back a half step, revealing his younger brother frozen behind him looking at me in fear and confusion.

I stepped forward instantly, my action causing the big one to step back a full step before he caught himself.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded, working himself into a rage or at least the semblance of one.

“Sorry to hit you over the head with it, but sometimes that’s the best way. Your brother is a new werewolf and tomorrow night he’ll change for the first….” I trailed off, feeling my head cock to one side as I got a real good look at the werewolfy one. He too was younger than I had first thought, maybe mid-twenties. The tired, haggard look had made him appear much older. My Sight showed me a were that was more than several months old.

“You’ve been through the Change before! More than once?”

He was still frozen, a panicky look on his face, but he flinched at the word Change.

His big brother’s meaty hand descended on the back of my neck, gripping hard, or at least trying to. Chet tells me that touching me is like touching rubber covered steel. The cop’s face registered the odd feeling and the fact that none of his considerable effort was moving me in any way. I turned, his hand falling away ineffectually.

“Stop that. Listen, you’re both about to start a bunch of denials mixed with righteous outrage and then you’ll swear at me and call me crazy. Let’s just skip that part and get to the meat of the matter. This one-“ I pointed at the werewolf, “ is going to sprout teeth, fur and claws tomorrow night. There’s no Alpha here to guide him and control him, so history tells us that he’ll go insane and kill as many people as he can find. On the flip side, I would guess that this isn’t the first change and he isn’t a gibbering idiot, so I’m really interested to hear how this happened, why you’re not insane, and what’s the plan for tomorrow night?”

The sheriff’s deputy opted for trying to punch me. I let him. His fist met my head ( I turned it so it missed my face) and came out of the contact in much worse condition than my head, which is pretty dense (just ask Lydia).

The younger one moved at me with a speed much faster than a normal human’s. I was impressed, not at his quickness, but that he appeared rational. Brushing aside his hands, I grabbed his throat and held him up off the floor against the wall to my right.

“Let me explain something. I specialize in werewolves and other things that go bump in the night. But my bumping is a whole lot harder than theirs. So, you can both settle down and talk about this or I can just solve the whole problem right now,” I said, giving the wolf a shake.

Oddly, the werewolf stopped fighting first, his older brother looking frantically at the cased shotguns on the little table in the kitchen.

“Deputy, if you start the whole gun thing you’re really not gonna be happy with the outcome,” I warned him.

“Who are you?” was the whispered question from the wolf. He had to whisper because my grip was closing off some of his airway.

“Oops, sorry about that,” I said, setting him down and taking my hand away.

“My name is Chris Gordon and I’ve been involved in this kinda business for a while now – the whole supernatural world of werewolves and vampires and stuff,” I said.

“Vampire?” was the younger one’s response. The cop was shaking out his bruised hand.

“Yeah, you’re not the only kind of monster out there,” I said. “But tell me how you came to be in this condition?”

They exchanged glances, then looked back at me. With a sigh the younger one spoke, holding out his hand. “I’m Jake Anderson and this is my brother Steve.”

I shook his hand, but Steve didn’t appear ready for that level of civility.

“Three months ago, I was out at a bar in our hometown of Grayling. There was a bit of drama-“ Steve snorted at that but Jake kept talking, “and I left the bar. I was too drunk to drive and too angry to wait for a ride so I started walking. Grayling isn’t very big and everyone knows me, so my chances of catching a ride home would have been pretty good,” he said.

“Would have?” I asked.

His face became haunted as he remembered it and Steve shuffled his feet unhappily at his brother’s expression.

“Yeah, would have, ‘cause I didn’t make it that far. About fifty yards from the bar I started to hear something in the woods beside me. I seriously thought about going back, which was, as it turned out, a pretty good instinct. One I ignored. I pictured myself slouching back in after my dramatic exit and couldn’t do it. So I kept walking in the moonlight and kept hearing the sounds. I moved to the other side of the road but after a minute I heard the sounds again only this time they were on the new side of the road, which really freaked me out. I started moving faster, thinking that running might be a good idea, but then something hit me from behind and that was it.”

“That was it?” I asked, looking back and forth between the brothers.

“Yeah, that’s all I remember, because next thing I knew I was waking up in the brush. I crawled back up to the road and Steve found me.”

“I was on duty that night and the girl he was messing around with got away from her boyfriend long enough to call me. I found him two hundred or so yards from the bar, lying on the shoulder of the road. Wasn’t till I got him home that I noticed the blood. He had a bite wound on his left shoulder, but it was already scabbed over. Next morning it was gone,” Steve said, the most he had spoken so far.

I turned to Steve fully. “Any unexplained deaths or disappearances in the county around that night?”

He frowned in thought. “No, nothing like that.”

“Any bikers strange to the area passing through?” I asked.

“No,” he said shaking his head. Then a light went off in his eyes. “There was stranger that came through, a foreign guy, English or something. Wealthy, nice clothes and expensive cameras. Said he was a photographer traveling the USA. Stopped in Grayling to explore the Huron National forest.”

“Okay, “ I said, thinking it through. “What happened the first full moon after the bite?”

They looked at each other, then Jake looked down at the table. His brother turned back my way.

“He turned into a big ass wolf,” he said. Silence reigned for a moment or two then Steve went on. “I was on day shifts that month. Jake felt ill, acted a little drunk sorta, though I don’t think he had anything to drink. He went to bed early. I was watching TV in the living room,” he paused and must have read my next question on my face. “We live together, in the house we grew up in. Our parents died in a car crash about ten years back. Jake was still in school and I was his guardian. Anyway, I’m watching a movie or something, when I hear noises from his room. I ignored them for a minute or two, but they got louder…bumps, bangs and something I think might be growls. So I opened his door and peeked in. The room is pretty much trashed, or at least the bed was, and there’s this monster wolf sitting in the middle of it growling at me. Nothing happens for a second or two, then it hits me! The wolf thingy has Jake’s eyes. I blurt out his name, he blinks at me then turns and jumps out the window. Rips the whole fucking frame right out!”

“How many died?” I asked, steeling myself for a high number.

They look at each other, then Jake answers. “How many what? Deer? Two. Cows? Just one,” he says sadly.

“No – people?” I clarify.

“What? None!” Jake blurts, shocked.

I’m suspicious, but Steve confirms it. “He didn’t hurt any people, mister. Just a cow at the Cooper farm and he thinks he remembers a couple of deer. The cow got blamed on a black bear. The month after that we came here for the full moon and let him run it out in the forest.”

I stared at the brothers for a full minute, not saying a word. A person who is bitten by a werewolf and survives, has about a thirty percent chance of contracting the Lycanthrope virus, or LV. The next full moon will result in a Change – the drastic, horribly painful complete rearrangement of their anatomy from human to giant wolf (or whatever the base were animal is).

The pain is ridiculous as is the drastic overlay of lupine instinct and super senses. If guided by an Alpha wolf, the individual survives with their personality and sanity intact. Without an Alpha, the odds are that they’ll go insane from the combination of pain, completely alien body and the intense instinct to hunt and kill. But if what the brothers was telling me was true (which would be easy to verify by looking at records or newspapers from a month ago) than Jake was one of a tiny minority that survived the first transition unaided and retained his human control.

“Were you a fighter in school Jake?” I asked.

“What? No!” he replied, confused by my change of topic.

“He was too popular in school to have any problems. Star receiver for the football team, popular with the girls and everyone knew he was my kid brother,” Steve said, the protective look on his face explaining much.

I explained what I knew about people who underwent the change unaided; how most became rogues that had to be killed, but that a very, very few sometimes survived largely intact. I say largely because becoming a were was traumatic and had to leave some marks on a psyche.

The fact that Jake was popular and neither an aggressive sort nor someone who was bullied by others may have been a huge factor. Throw in an extremely strong bond with his older brother and the fact that said brother was the first human he encountered post-Change and it could have been the right set of circumstances for him to get through it.

“So last month you came here, right? Let me guess, someone here at the resort saw you?” I asked.

“I guess. I don’t remember much about being a wolf…just bits and pieces,” Jake said.

His brother was nodding, still watching me warily. “He changed in the woods, then I think he ran for a while. After that he either followed my scent back or just knew the way because he was scratching at the door just before dawn. I let him in quick, but some of the guests were up and around,” Steve said.

“He scratched at the door to come in? And you let him? What did he do, curl up on the floor?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, pretty much. Why?” Steve asked.

“Because it’s incredibly dangerous to be anywhere near a new werewolf. It can take years for most bitten weres to develop control. But two months into the whole lifestyle and your brother is like a sheep dog!”

“He wasn’t like any dog. He was edgy and had a look in his eyes. But I just talked to him like I always do, fed him a steak and tried to act normal. I sat in the chair over there –“ he pointed at a beat up arm chair, “and he finally just circled around and laid down. Then he Changed back,” Steve said, shuddering as he remembered it.

“You called me a bitten were? Are there born ones?” Jake asked suddenly.

So I spent the next two hours filling them in on the facts of supernatural life. I explained about both bitten and natural weres, about the different species of weres, their rules of behavior and the penalties for breaking those rules. Steve learned about how to act around Jake when he was in wolf form, although he had done pretty well already. How not to make eye contact, or get angry with him or make threats. Eating immediately after the Change (meat for the wolf and any high calorie – high protein food for the human) would ease the pain of transition no matter the direction of the Change.

“I’ll make an introduction to the local Pack closest to you in Michigan,” I said, taking a big bite of the ham sandwich Jake had whipped up. Steve wasn’t eating, just sipping a Sam Adams and watching us devour our massive Dagwood sandwiches.

“You eat like he does. But you’re not a werewolf?” Steve said suddenly.

“I do and I’m not,” I said around a mouthful.

“What are you?” Jake asked.

“No one knows. Sorta a hybrid.”

“Hybrid what?” Steve asked.

“I have some were characteristics, but most of my attributes are closer to vampire,” I said.

“So they’re real too,” Steve said, making it a statement.

“Most definitely,” I answered.

“We didn’t invite you in, but you came in anyway,” Jake said, pointing with his sandwich in emphasis.

I laughed. “That’s bullshit. Vampires aren’t kept out by a home’s threshold, which by the way, this cabin doesn’t have. Demons are the ones that can’t enter a home unless one of the inhabitants consciously or unconsciously invites them. A home is where families live and bond. Human relationships – good ones that is – create barriers around a home over time. We call that threshold. Your house that you grew up it would have a very strong threshold. But it doesn’t affect vampires,” I explained.

“Do you drink blood as well as eat food?” Jake asked.

“Nope, just food…by the truck load.”

“How did you become….whatever you are?” Jake asked.

“That’s a very long story for another time. But let me ask a question. What’s up with the girl –Britta?”

Jake looked startled while his brother grimaced.

“My little brother has always been popular with the ladies. He’s something of a player. Britta took a liking to him when we were here last month,” Steve explained.

“Isn’t she a touch young for you?” I asked.

“She’s eighteen, and yes that’s too young for him,” Steve answered. Jake looked chagrined.

“She doesn’t look or act eighteen, so I just sorta automatically flirt with her,” he said. “But she’s a really solid, mature girl.”

“Odd, but Erika seems more your type,” I noted, thinking of the more forward of the twins.

“I know, right? But the thing is we don’t really have any use for each other. It’s odd, because they’re virtually identical in looks, but I don’t feel any attraction for Erika and she doesn’t seem to for me either,” he said, wondering at the last part. Apparently he wasn’t used to being ignored by anything female.

“Well, you might want to keep your intentions fully honorable, because all three – mother, and both daughters, are witches,” I said.

Both men looked at me for a moment or two, obviously confused, till my meaning dawned on Jake’s face. “Wait, you mean like real witches? Cauldron and eye of newt type witches?”

“Yeah, the kind that cast spells that really work,” I said, awaiting their disbelief.

“I got the impression that they were the nature worship, tea brewing, religion kinda witches, you know like Wiccans,” Jake said.

“I hear ya, but these are the real deal. They worship nature, many witches do, but these three are much more than just that, so you might want to watch your step,” I warned. “Look I gotta get back to my wife, but I want to go with you tomorrow night and keep an eye on you when you change.”

Jake started to shake his head and his brother looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Now it’s my turn to ask you if you’re insane,” Steve said.

“Nah, I’ve been around hundreds of werewolves,” I said, not mentioning that many of those were now dead. “I can make sure you don’t hurt anyone, keep you centered. Plus I won’t be alone, my companions will help too.”

“Your companions?” Steve asked

“My wife and….dog,” I said with a shrug, not yet ready to explain a werebear-wolf.

They both just stared at me for a while.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and take a guess. They’re both weird like you,” Steve said.

“In their own ways,” I said, heading for the door.

Chapter 13

Night had fully fallen when Tanya and her giant furry companion came back from their recon.

“The woods around here are….interesting,” she said when she came up for air from the side of my neck.

I took a second or two to answer, the heady swirl of intense feeling I get when she feeds on me making thought difficult. “How so?”

“Your blondes have left little talismans all around the perimeter of the resort. Little creations of sticks, stones, fur and feathers. Kinda like the crap in Blair Witch,” she answered, licking her lips, her blue eyes temporarily silver.

“They’re positioned at all four cardinal points plus more in between. They all face outward like posted signs.”

Her comment about posted signs made me think of the desert home of a Navajo witch I knew. His property was guarded by a twisted little horror show of creepy animal skull fetishes. The thought gave me the shudders – what can I say – I really don’t like witches.

Tanya picked up on my emotion, shaking her head. “They’re kind of creepy but not like those skull things you told me about. But that’s just the beginning. Outside the circle of stick figures, I could smell traces of something….”

She trailed off, thinking, so after a moment I prompted her. “Something?”

Her attention snapped back to me. “Odd. Something odd that smells of decay and wild and also, a little bit, human.”

“Did ‘Sos smell it?” I asked.

“Definitely! Better than I did, and he didn’t like it at all. Kept sneezing and shaking his head – got all wary and alert,” she said, absently stroking the side of my face and neck with one graceful hand. That was very distracting, so I captured the hand in question and held it still while I struggled to get back on topic. She grinned at the effect she was having on me. Little vampire minx.

I filled her in on the brothers in the cabin next door and their wolf situation.

“A bitten were that successfully Changed on his own without losing his marbles? That’s exceedingly rare! I have to meet this lady’s man!” she declared.

A small growl escaped me at the way she said it, making her grin all over again.

“You, my zayka, are too easy to play,” she said. I growled again and pounced on her, knocking her back onto the queen sized bed.

Quite some time later we got back to the topic.

“So we got three witches living here who have placed some kind of witchy no trespassing signs that didn’t affect you, me or Awasos, nor did it bother werewolf boy. And something you can’t identify is roaming the woods and it makes ‘Sos’s hair stand up,” I said in summation.

“And one of the teen witches has a crush on sexy wolf boy,” Tanya added.

“How do you know he’s sexy?” I asked.

“You said he was a player type and Britta is all hot and bothered by him so it just makes sense,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, the other sister is all hot and bothered by you!”

“Nah, she’s just a bored kid stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do,” I said, dismissing her observation. Tanya went quiet and my link went a few degrees chillier.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s one thing for me to tweak you about other males, because I have Chosen. But you know how I feel about other girls!” she said. “And you always, always play down how attractive you are to them!”

She was pissed. Even I could figure that out. Despite my internal link to her I still struggled with relationship stuff.

“I think it’s stupid that the V-squared suddenly made me stand out. I spent my whole life being ignored by women and now, suddenly, I’m like a big target,” I tried to explain.

“Do you know how much most men would love to be in your position?” she asked, her voice still dangerously quiet.

“I have never been, nor will I ever be, like most men. Most men didn’t grow up with demon crosshairs on the forehead of anyone who got near them. I was happy to stay unnoticed,” I said, which wasn’t fully the truth but close to it. Who wants to be ignored? But long ago I had made a sorta peace with the concept of not drawing demonic attention to anyone I thought I could like.

“This change in my appearance is artificial, created by the virus,” I said, dismissively.

She snorted. “More artificial than fake boobs, liposuction, makeup or even clothes that flatter the physique? Yours are at least skin deep,” she said.

“So what’s our next step?” I asked, changing the topic.

She frowned and wagged one finger at me, letting me know she wasn’t fooled. Still, she went with me. “I think, now that it’s fully dark out, that we three should keep watch around the perimeter of the resort to see what shows up. My inclination is that we stay inside the circle of talismans,” she said.

I looked at her sharply. “Really? Inside? What did this thing smell like again?” I asked, concerned by something that made her want to play it safe.

“It’s tough to say. Some supernatural that I haven’t come across yet. Maybe human at one time but now……not so much.”
“You said it smelled wild?”

“Hmmm, probably not the right word. It smelled bad, like rotted flesh and rotten eggs, mixed with forest loam and pine needles,” she explained, frustrated with trying to put words to a scent.

One of the hardest changes for me to learn to handle was the increased ability to smell. Tanya had grown up with it, but I was still trying to learn to sort through the vast miasma of scents that constantly bombarded my now sensitive sniffer. Honestly, I don’t know how dogs deal with it. One part of her description worried me in particular.

“Wait, rotten eggs?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was definitely mixed in,” she said.

“Rotten egg smell comes from sulfur,” I said.

“I get it. Sulfur and brimstone, as in demons?” she clarified.

“Yup, there’s always a nasty sulfur smell whenever I’ve messed with demons.”

“Well, we’ll just have to see about this time,” she said.

Chapter 14

A couple of hours later found the three of us spread out around the resort, waiting in the dark. We ideally should have formed a kind of triangle, each at a roughly equidistant point from the other two, covering as much of the circle that was formed by the little talismans as possible. But the pond blocked a big portion of the territory. A path circled the pond along its shoreline and the talismans on that part of the perimeter were just off the path. So we decided to ignore the quarter or so of the arc blocked by the pond and concentrated on the rest of the circle.

Tanya was farthest from me in the woods behind cabin one. Awasos was across the main road where it met the driveway directly out from the lodge. I was out past empty cabin five watching the woods that were closest to cabins three, four and five. I could feel where Tanya was and even get a little flavor of what she was sensing. Awasos was between us and even though he moved ghost quiet I could tell roughly where he was. Something like a stereo effect of my vampire’s senses coming through our link and my own. Plus all the little animals and insects were quiet in a ten foot radius from where he lay stretched out in the pine needles. The little vacuum of silence radiated in the mental map laid out in my head, lit up like a computer grid.

Tanya was alert, her mind in predator mode. The woods looked bright, lit by the mostly full moon, making it look like daylight to my changed eyes. The smaller denizens of the forest were busy gathering food; chipmunks, mice, voles and shrews, all scurrying through the leaf litter alert for things to eat while trying to avoid being eaten. A barred owl and her mate hunted seventy-five yards to my right, while a small weasel stalked a deer mouse ten yards directly in front of my sitting log.

Part of me automatically tracked the little life and death struggles around me, while another part worked on the odd mix of people that inhabited the resort. Garth seemed straight forward enough, while his wife, Quinby, was a complicated enigma. The twins were normal, bored teenage girls, if you ignored their ability to throw magic around. Britta was quiet and deep, those were the ones my mother said to watch out for. Her sister was brassy and adventurous, what you saw was what you got.

Cleveland was a small minded asshole, mad at the world and frustrated with a life that didn’t live up to his high school years. His wife carried herself with the pained expression of the oppressed; someone trapped in a dead end marriage. Billy was, as far as I could tell, a good enough kid being raised by an asshole father.

The professors were an odd couple. Closet cryptozoologists who were open about their gay lifestyle but nervous about their monster hunting hobby. They seemed open and nice, but something about them wasn’t quite right.

The brothers Anderson were a surprising find and the most likely answer to the mystery of the Dogman. But Jake being a sane rogue was a statistical anomaly, one that added to all the other anomalies of the resort. Finding three Swedish witches living deep in the Michigan forest with a sane werewolf rogue surrounded by a perimeter of protective talisman while a monster hunting gay duo looked for evidence practically begged for me to play the lotto with all their cabin numbers or something.

The fucked up Cleveland family was the most normal part of the whole Scooby doo adventure. Then I realized something else; the odd tug of recognition I had experienced when I saw the dude in the woodpile cleared itself in my mind. It was the simple fact that his facial features reminded me of my friends among the Mohawk people back home. No great mystery as Michigan was home to many Native peoples.

The watchful part of my brain suddenly poked the thoughtful part. The woods around me had gone dead quiet. Every little animal and bird had frozen in place, too terrified to move. Then the stench hit me, hard enough to make my eyes water. Carrion, rotten eggs and a shitty sewer smell all rolled into one delightful bouquet of vomit inducing proportions.

Grim roiled inside me, ready to pop free and take charge. Tanya tells me that my purple eyes flash dark violet when that part of me peeks out. The wind which had been blowing gently from the northwest suddenly kicked up a notch, bringing more of the miasma of rotting meat and crap my way. It died back down as quickly as it had started, and I realized it wasn’t the wind but the passage of something large moving incredibly fast. And I knew without a doubt, that that something was now less than thirty feet away, on the other side of a large maple tree. It was standing there, sensing, reading the forest around it. One of the Boklund witchy talismans was fastened to that very tree, right about where the thing was standing.

A scratching sounded on the far side of the tree, just a little etch-etch of a sound, like a very sharp talon lightly tearing at bark. Just about where the talisman was tied up. It was poking at the little stick figure posted sign, like a thief trying to pick a lock.

Grim surged to the surface and I shot ten feet forward of where I had been standing, now staring at the thing behind the tree.

Seven feet tall, and bone thin, it stood naked staring back at me. Huge orange eyes took up much of a sunken, stretched face that was defined by a grotesquely distorted mouth full of needle pointed teeth and long ears held close to its skull. Its skin was ash gray and stretched tight across the body like a drum. Sinew and muscle twisted and writhed under the taut flesh like snakes in spandex, moving even as it stood frozen watching me. Long filthy hair dangled around its shoulders, greasy and matted, filled with twigs and leaves. It had no sex that I could see, although I didn’t try to real hard to find one. The arms, long and spindly looking were tipped with four inch long black claws.

My appearance had shocked it, that was easy enough to read in its body language, but it didn’t stay that way for more than a second. It flashed forward coming straight at me as fast as anything I had ever seen. As fast as Tanya, as fast as an Elder vampire. Grim took me low and to my left a half pace, my aura bladed right arm swinging at its long thin right leg. Surprised again by my move, it nonetheless managed to jump high enough to avoid losing a limb. Its leap took it twelve feet up the side of a big maple where it clung like some elongated goblin. A flick of my Sight showed a greasy blackness pooled around it, telling me it was demonic in nature.

My left side was pressed up against a thigh thick ash tree, leaving me one less direction to move when it sprang in my direction. This time it screeched as it flashed through the air, and the cold, calculating Grim part of me noted two answering screeches from deeper in the forest. Its speed was awful and it took every bit of my own to move out of its path. My left arm had encircled the ash tree and when I moved, the aural blade running the length of my forearm sliced through the trunk without resistance. The thing hit the tree, the tree leapt off its stump, the angry screech changed to shock and my right fist punched it in the back of the head. In slow motion the heavy log hung suspended, horizontal to the ground, the demon thing clinging upside down and shaking its head. My punch should have killed it, although it did stun it long enough for the tree to slam down on the ground, the monster pinned underneath. Time sped up to normal and the forest was quiet for a short second. Then the tree was shoved violently into the air, rising ten feet up. The monster hauled itself out from below and bolted into the woods, screeching the whole time. Two more answering cries echoed out of the forest. The sounds of its lightning fast movement died away and it was gone, all in the time it took for the fallen log to resettle to the forest floor.

“Making friends with the local wildlife?” Tanya asked from behind me.

“I have no idea what that thing was, but it should have died right there!” I replied, turning to see Awasos in bear form and my vampire standing a few yards away.

“Sounded like two more just like it,” she commented.

“Tanya, it was as fast as you,” I said. “And tough!”

“What did it look like?”

“Tall and cadaver thin, with gray skin. Like a skinny seven foot tall basketball player who hasn’t eaten in a month. Long claws, pointy teeth, orange eyes and a demonic essence,” I said.

“Awesome,” she said, sounding remarkably like Lydia.

“That’s creepier than the monster,” I said, shuddering at the thought of two spikey haired little vampires tormenting me.

She grinned then glided through the woods to the big maple, studying the talisman and the bark around it.

“Looks like it started to pick apart the Blair Witch thingy,” she noted.

Moving up beside her, I saw what she meant. The little stick figure was held together with vine and twisted fibers. Those twists of vegetation were now ripped and slightly shredded looking, although the talisman still held together if only by a strand or two.

“Looks like someone was trying to disarm the alarm, so to speak,” I said. Awasos sniffed the ground under the fallen ash tree and growled deep in his chest.

“Let’s go get the alarm makers,” Tanya said.

***

An hour later found us back at the tree with Quinby, Garth and the twins. Also along for the merry ride was the mystery wood stacker, whose name was Tom. Apparently he was a general handyman sort who had worked at the resort even before the Boklunds had bought it.

Quinby examined the shredded talisman for several moments before looking first at her husband then her girls. Finally she looked our way, her expression sour.

“You seem to be right, Mr.Gordon. This one was close to falling apart,” she said, her voice still showing anger at me, but now mixed with fear. Waking the Boklunds and explaining why hadn’t been smooth or easy. We had spent almost forty minutes convincing them that Tanya wasn’t going to attack them and that the whole story of the monsters was real. Oddly, it wasn’t the monsters themselves, but the part of my story when I had mentioned fighting one of them that met the most disbelief.. Quinby had been certain I was lying as no one could fight one of them and live. But the part about the stick figure being pulled apart had scared her enough to accompany us back into the woods in the dark.

Tom, the handyman, had appeared fully dressed and armed with a Mossberg shotgun with a three D battery flashlight duct taped to the barrel when we all trooped outside. Garth carried a big double bladed ax and the three women just wrapped a couple of their wooden bead necklaces around their hands. My Sight showed deep pools of black around those strands of string and wood, indicating that they would likely be much more effective against the monsters than the ax or the shotgun.

“So, Mrs. Boklund, what are these things?” Tanya asked, quietly.

Tom answered first.

“My people, the MicMac, call them Cheenos. The local tribes around here would call them Wendigos.”

“Wendigos? Don’t they come from cannibalistic humans?” Tanya asked.

“That is the legend,” he agreed with a short nod.

“They have mostly avoided us, but lately they’ve been around more and more. But the wards always kept them away. Now they are trying to break through. I’m not sure what can stop them,” Quinby said.

Her husband had been studying the ash tree I had cut, rubbing his fingers on some of the really nasty looking black goo that was stuck underneath the tree trunk. He glanced my way, then looked back at the stump of the tree, the one that was cut so clean it looked like it had been sanded and polished.

“They’re demonic?” Tanya asked, her face pointed at Quinby and Tom, but her eyes glancing sideways at me.

“The legends of my people say that Cheenos have hearts of frozen ice and that they take in the souls of those they kill,” Tom said.

Quinby glanced his way then spoke her own piece. “They are drawn to supernaturals more than regular humans. Our magic has kept them at bay, but when Jake arrived last month they became bolder, more interested,” she said. “Some of my sister witches here in Hiawatha feel that they prefer to prey on weres and possibly other supernaturals.” She looked at Tanya as she said the last few words.

Tanya snorted, her message clear. She was no one’s prey, although sometimes mine as I was hers. She smiled at me as I thought that.

“I think they have invited demons inside them, but haven’t been forced out for whatever reason,” I said, thinking of the greasy black aura of the one I fought had had.

“So a newly bitten werewolf shows up and they start swarming about,” Tanya mused.

Quinby, who was watching both Tanya and I with distrustful eyes suddenly spoke. “Who are you people? Why are you here?”

Tanya swiveled in place to face her head on, her movements smooth and liquid.

“What do you know about my people?” she asked in reply.

“You are vampire…Darkkin,” Quinby said, her eyes tight with worry and fear. The twins were watching this exchange with tense postures and my Sight showed pooled blackness in their hands.

“Yes, true enough. You know the name we call ourselves. Do you know of our society, our laws?”

“Just that you are ruled by a coven of very old vampires.”

“It’s quite a bit more structured than that. Kind of a cross between a monarchy and a corporation,” Tanya said. “Chris, Awasos and I are a Rover team. We investigate mysteries and solve problems. If Darkkin break our rules, we are jury, judge and executioners for them. One of our biggest jobs is to keep our world away from society at large.”

“What brought you here?” Erika asked, but her sister answered first.

“The Dogman sightings,” Britta guessed.

“Yes, Britta, the Dogman. See, the local werewolf population considers this forest off limits, yet suddenly there are sightings of what we thought was a werewolf, which turned out to be Jake. We were asked to investigate.”

“The two-natured avoid these woods because of the Cheeno,” Tom said from his crouched position where he was studying something.

“That is what we are thinking as well. The weres never explained why Hiawatha is off limits but I think its because they fall prey to the Cheeno, who because they are demonic, can sneak up on weres,” Tanya said.

“But not you?” Quinby asked.

“Not us,” Tanya agreed.

“What about him?” Erika asked suddenly, pointing at me. “He’s not a vampire!”

“No, he is not,” my vampire agreed, looking at me with a smile. “He is much more special than that!”

It was my turn to snort. “Yeah, like short bus special according to Lydia,”

Tanya laughed, catching the Boklunds off guard.

“My Christian doesn’t take himself too seriously, but be assured that everyone else should.”

“We have another problem,” Tom said from his spot on the ground. “Grizzly bear, huge one,” he said, pointing at a track.

Everyone crowded around a perfect dinner plate sized track from Awasos right hind foot.

“Don’t worry about that. That’s not a problem,” I said trying to avoid what was sure to come next.

“How can a giant grizzly suddenly popping up in a forest that hasn’t held grizzlies for hundreds of years not be a problem?” Garth asked, darkly suspicious.

They all looked at me expectantly. I glanced at Tanya who arched one eyebrow while our personal link fed me her feelings.

“Fine, because they’re witches but I don’t like it,” I replied to her unspoken thoughts.

“Sos, go ahead and show them buddy,” I said to the giant wolf by my side. He met my gaze then swiveled his head to face them, his form shimmering and expanding. I held my spot, although I was suddenly crowded by a furry half ton of bear.

“Holy fuck!” Erika exclaimed, falling back a step.

For a split second, no one else made a sound, then Quinby spoke. “Erika! Watch your language!”

“No, she’s right,” Garth said. “Although I would phrase it ‘what the fuck’?”

Quinby shot him a look but otherwise said nothing.

“He is a were-bear-wolf,” Tanya said, sliding her arm around the giant neck that was level with her shoulders.

“Awasos is ‘bear’ in Abenaki,” Tom said, a shocked look on his face.

“He is quite unique,” I said. “Now, how many of these Cheenos are there?”

“I don’t know for certain. Two or three I believe,” Quinby said.

“Three!” Erika chimed in. Her mother gave her a look. “What? I’ve seen three different sets of tracks,” the blonde girl said defensively.

“What do their tracks look like?” I asked. Only a small section of ground near where I had met the Cheeno was soft enough for tracks and it was filled with prime grizzly footprints.

“There are some this way,” Erika replied, shining her flashlight into the woods toward the next talisman location. There seemed to be about fifty or so of the little stick figures in the perimeter around the resort. Together they formed what Quinby had termed a Ward, which seemed to be like a witchy force field or something. Britta pulled a newly made talisman from her jacket pocket and used it to replace the shredded one. The three witches held hands and sang a song in what I guessed to be Swedish (my only reference for that language was the Swedish Chef on the Muppets Show). Then Erika led the way through the woods although I sent Awasos out to provide a security screen in case the Cheenos were still around. A look from Tanya and we silently agreed for me to move up on point while she fell back with Britta, who was trailing the group.

We traveled several hundred yards through the woods, following an arc around the property till we came to another of the little wooden men tied to a big white pine. The base of the tree was soft and tracked up with extra-long, super skinny footprints. Like very thin Bigfoot tracks tipped with claw marks.

“How do the legends say these things form?” I asked Tom.

“Men or women whose hearts harden against others are usually at the base of the stories that I know. They kill and, at some point, eat the flesh of man. Their hearts freeze solid and they become Cheenos,” he said. “Usually they have retreated into the wilderness for many years before they are transformed.”

Garth spoke up. “The Wendigo legends have been generally thought to be warnings of the dangers of cannibalism. They all take place in the northern lands where long winters have sometimes resulted in severe food shortages and ultimately, cannibalism,” he said.

I must have looked at him funny, because Quinby explained. “My husband minored in Folklore in college.”

Certainly, starvation or cabin fever, or both, could result in the right conditions to invite demonic possession. The physical changes, the speed and invulnerability to harm were all much greater than anything I had seen before. This might be a different breed of demons than I was familiar with or a different kind of possession because of the cannibalism.

“Tomorrow is the first full moon,” Tanya said, looking up at the silvery orb in the night sky.

“Jake will turn and these things will hunt him,” I said, understanding her thought train.

“How did you survive your encounter,” Quinby asked.

“I told you. We fought, he didn’t like the direction things were going in and left,” I said.

“I am familiar with Jake’s kind, somewhat. They are helpless against these things,” she said.

“Well, many demons can hide themselves from humans or supernaturals. Also, these things are really fast and there is at least three of them.”

“So how did you see them?” she continued.

I shrugged, but my vampire answered the question for me. “Christian was born to fight demons. He was selected by God to do so,” she said.

All four Boklunds gaped at her. “Selected by God?” Garth asked, his tone derisive.

“Your women are all witches, you live in a forest haunted by demons, and you know about werewolves and vampires. Yet you have difficulty thinking that God might choose a warrior?” Tanya replied, turning unerringly toward the distant resort with liquid grace. She floated through the woods, leading the way back without waiting for a response.

Garth, Quinby and the twins exchanged glances, looked at me curiously, then started to follow without a word. Tom and I took up the rear of the silent column. You could just about hear the gears of thought grinding among them as we returned to the resort.

Chapter 15

Satisfied, we escorted the Boklunds back to the resort, then the three of us attempted to trail the Cheeno I had wounded. We lost the trail at the edge of a boggy swamp, the tracks and trail utterly absorbed by pools of stagnant water and mud. The swamp was big enough that attempting to circle it for more tracks would take most of a day, even moving at vampire speeds.

Momentarily stumped, we headed back to cabin four.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked my vampire as I made a gi-normous omelet to split with ‘Sos, who was back in wolf form. The moon had begun its descent and my bed was calling me. It had been a really long day and night.

“Keep wolf-boy from running off into the woods and yet not killing anyone else, while hunting down and killing the Cheenos, all without anyone noticing,” she said straight faced.

“Sounds like a piece of cake,” I said around a big bite of omelet. She frowned at me, a little furrow forming between her perfect brows.

“You didn’t fill that thing with onions did you? You know I don’t like that much onion,” she said.

I held my right thumb and forefinger a half inch apart. “This much onion I swear and only ‘cause ‘Sos insists on onions in his omelet,” I replied. Awasos lifted his head from his own platter and growled at me.

“Leave him out of this,” Tanya said, moving across the tiny room in a liquid blur till she was half a foot away. She sniffed my face.

“Hmm, I guess it’s not that much onion,” she said, smiling suddenly and kissing me quickly.

Tanya doesn’t eat solid food – no vampire does, but she says she can taste what I’ve been eating when she drinks my blood. Since I’m the only one she drinks directly from (except emergencies like in the middle of combat or something) the only variety she gets is by changes in my diet.

So now we’re a little like a middle-aged married couple where the wife is always monitoring what the husband eats to protect him from his own cholesterol or triglycerides or something. And she has definite opinions about what tastes good and what doesn’t. She’s not big on onions, habanero peppers or licorice, but ironically thinks garlic is tasty.

So I fed, she fed and, of course, Awasos kept right on feeding straight through. Then I caught a couple hours of sleep, waking at dawn to take over so Tanya could sleep when the sun came up.

Ten AM found me and the big bad wolf circling the property looking for trails and sign. I wanted to understand which approaches the Cheenos favored, which paths they traveled the most. Awasos had already scouted the day before with Tanya, so once he understood what I was looking for he led me straight to it. Of course, all that took was for me to explain it out loud – once. I swear he’s smarter than two thirds of the humans I know.

What we found was that the Cheenos always came from the swamp, although they had about five well-travelled trails approaching the resort from multiple directions.

I pulled up a map of the swamp on my smartphone and discovered it was much bigger than I had thought. After a moment I turned to Awasos.

“Go back and guard Tanya while she sleeps. I’m gonna travel through the trees and see if I can get a read on these things.”

He didn’t care much for that idea. Frankly, neither did I.

Three hours later and I had confirmed that it was a big frigging swamp. Jumping from tree to tree, wading through muck when necessary, I had covered big swaths of it. Still didn’t really touch the place. The terrain had been carved by glaciers in the last Ice Age, that much I recalled from my Google of Hiawatha Forest some days ago. It had left this part with lots of ponds and swamps dotted with raised land that managed to provide some dry areas. One of those hummocks had sported a rotting husk of a cabin, but it was long deserted. I had managed to hit the scent of the Cheenos a couple of times but it always petered out before I could get more than a whiff.

Sodden and filthy, I returned to little cabin four and cleaned up, then fed myself and the bottomless pit named Awasos.

About four in the afternoon, Tanya popped up, snacked on me and got ready for the night. First we checked on Jake and Steve, who had stayed at the resort all day. Then we met with the Boklunds to plan.

The women had reinforced the perimeter wards throughout the day, doubling the number of little Blair Witch memorials that circled the property. Their idea for the night was to raise a circle of Power that would keep Jake on the property. If the Cheenos showed up and we wanted to get ourselves killed by them, well that was our problem. We agreed, although I had misgivings about trying to contain a werewolf in a witches circle.

Next we all trooped to cabin three and explained the plan to the werewolf lad and his brother. Both were pretty skeptical about both the circle holding Jake and the whole Cheeno thing.

“So you’re good with werewolves, you believe in vampires, but the witch and Wendigo part are too much?” I asked in disbelief of their disbelief.

“It just seems too much,” Jake said with a shrug.

Quinby raised one eyebrow at the brothers, then fingered one of her necklaces.

“Oh boy, here we go!” Garth said, backing up to give his wife room.

Quinby smiled at the brothers and nothing appeared to happen as her right hand rubbed a small wooden bead formed like a bird. Then suddenly every object on the table, the counter tops and the unmade beds lifted straight up into the air, all hovering at eye level. Running shoes, dirty cookware, a box of donuts, shotgun shells, a camo hat, the toaster, numerous cans of Budweiser in various stages of consumption, and a pair of chili pepper emblazoned boxers all floated around us. Jake and Steve looked around the tiny cabin, eyes wide and nodded. “Okay, this might work” was Steve’s input. Jake was a bit shaken looking and I could see him glancing at Britta occasionally. I’m pretty sure he was rerunning every conversation he’d had with her, reviewing every promise or endearment.

The twins sat in the worn armchairs that flanked the south facing picture window, Erika grinning and bouncing her crossed leg while she snapped her gum and Britta looking out the window, a sad and resolved look on her face.

“Okay, so we’re onboard with this now?” I asked the brothers. They nodded and Quinby released her charm, the objects all dropping to the floor, table or countertop below. Except the box of donuts which found its way into my hands. I snagged two of the powdered sugar-covered jelly-filled beauties then spotted a huge liquid brown eye staring at me from the screen door. Sighing I a snagged two more for my furry buddy and together we scarfed them down.

“Where do you want to put the circle?” Tanya asked Quinby, then sighed as she glanced my way. She made a face cleaning motion at me, looking mildly exasperated. Still beautiful, but exasperated.

“Out beyond cabin five. There’s a big clear spot where we sometimes set up a volleyball court,” the blonde witch replied, looking at me and my wolf-bear curiously. “I used to play volleyball in college you know,” she added, apropos of nothing.

“Really?” I asked in my best surprised voice, almost loud enough to cover Tanya’s snort…almost.

Chapter 16

Dusk crept across the resort, turning the bright spring day to a dark foreboding night. The forest loomed around the resort, making it an island in an ocean of blackness. The lodge was lit up, the big sodium light over the woodpile humming to itself while every cabin had a bonfire burning.

Tom had built a fire at each cabin, supposedly at the Boklunds request on the false pretense of giving each guest a campfire atmosphere. The additional light was not enough to alleviate the gloom that had fallen over the Copper Top Cabin resorts, but it did reflect nicely from the metal roofs that gave the resort its name.

I was in the woods just outside the clearing at cabin five where Jake stood unhappily inside a fifteen foot circle of salt. Britta and Steve stood near the empty cabin watching the half-naked werewolf and waiting for the moon to come up.

Tanya and Awasos were on watch about a hundred yards to either side of me. Our theory was that the Cheenos would be drawn to Jake, if they were, in fact, attracted to supernatural creatures. Having the three of us clustered around the young werewolf concentrated the supernatural bait so to speak.

Britta and Steve would head into cabin five which was outfitted with a whole slew of stick man fetishes. In addition, Steve clutched his Remington 1100 shotgun in his hands. While I doubted he could even hit a superfast Cheeno, the mixture of salt and steel shot in the shells might have some effect at close range. Maybe, maybe not.

The rest of the Boklunds were back at the lodge, which like cabin five, was liberally festooned with stickmen. In fact, all the cabins sported Blair Witch mementos as an attempt to keep the Cheenos away. Quinby thought the demons would come at the resort from the woods closest to cabin five, but would be held by her Wards. My own experience with the things didn’t give me as much confidence in her perimeter. The Cheenos had avoided the witches till Jake had shown up a month earlier. Now I figured they might find a way to get through. Although it made me wonder that the demons were drawn to weres and vampires but avoided witches. Odd that.

The silver moon had not yet made her appearance and the dusky gloom was quiet save for the sounds of crickets around me and frogs chorusing down by the pond.

Tanya was calm and thinking quiet thoughts, Awasos was watching silently and my lack of sleep was making me drowsy. All told, I’d only had a few hours of sleep since leaving Chicago and now I was starting to nod off. After a few attempts to push myself to a higher level of awareness, I sensed Tanya’s amusement at my condition. “Go ahead, it’s early and we’re watching,” she whispered at me a football field away. I heard it like she was next to me and I immediately took her words to heart. It was too early for demons. Still hearing her silken tones in my head, I nodded off.

***

It was the tree falling that woke me. A slow, low vibration that started in the ground then moved up in the canopy of the forest to the wide limbed top of an old maple. One moment I’m dreaming of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a steakhouse, the next I’m staring at a giant mass of leaves slamming through the roof of green overhead. It fell directly into one of Quinby’s talisman trees, ripping the smaller tree out of the ground and shoving it over at an angle, then hitting the ground with an earth shaking whump.

Almost immediately two other trees fell a little further down the circle of the Wards, taking out another pair of magical fence posts. Broken limbs and clusters of ripped leaves continued to fall after the thick trunks had settled to the forest floor.

“That can’t be good,” Britta muttered behind me.

The forest quieted by degrees, falling into a complete silence. Then the stench of rotting flesh and feces rolled over me, giving me a split second before it appeared on the twisted trunk of the maple. It could have been the same monster from the night before or its twin. Same ugly elongated, skeletal build, covered with grayish skin and cabled muscle. Same needle sharp teeth and wicked claw-tipped hands. Goblin ears and huge light-catching orange eyes. Those lantern eyes stared straight at me, penetrating the dark shadows I was hidden in. It hissed. It leapt.

I was watching all this as an observer, my Grim side running the show from the moment I awoke. My combat persona surprised both watcher-me and the Cheeno. We/I sprang right at the oncoming monster, meeting it in mid-air, shooting under its outstretched arms like an Olympic wrestler. My body twisted in mid-air, changing both our direction of flight and the sudden landing that came after.

Grim, my second personality, is a savant. My therapist, who is also my liaison with the federal government, thinks that part of my mind split itself when I was eight. When my family was axed to death in front of me. Somehow I compartmentalized the primitive, savage part of my mind that a million years ago help Grok, my caveman ancestor to fight and survive. I packed that fighter-self into its own section and left it to face the demon that killed my folks. Gina says that when faced with traumatic horror people, especially children, may split off a part of their personality to deal with it.

In my case, Grim sat silent for years, absorbing every martial arts class, every defensive tactic, every combat lesson I ever learned. And he (if I can, in fact refer to a part of myself that way) assimilated and meshed those lessons with genius. When I was exposed to demonic blood, it bound itself to the Grim part of me, giving my savage self a boost of ruthless ability that was, frankly, scary. Grim would have been a frightening adversary in a normal body, being able to push it beyond human limitations. In my V-squared riddled, metabolically jacked, exponentially stronger vampire-like body, equipped with my God given aura abilities, well, Grim was like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer mixed with Wolverine and Sargent Slaughter on steroids. And he’d (I’d?) apparently been thinking about my/our last bout with Cheeno beast.

I/we landed on the gray skinned rubbery monster, my limbs and torso wreathed with mono-molecular aura blades, including the forearm that was against its throat. The Cheeno screamed a short abbreviated screech as its body exploded into at least seven individual and highly disgusting chunks, plus whole slew of smaller, mushier pieces, all liberally coated with an oil thick, black blood-like fluid.

Knowing it was demonic in nature, I wrestled back enough control from Grim to try and push the evil essence from the body, er, chunks. But the particular spidey-sense that I use with demons gave me some strange feedback. The demon wasn’t spread throughout the body like the Hellbourne I was used to dealing with. Instead it was all concentrated in the spattered mush that used to be the thing’s chest.

Reaching my left hand into the black and gray goo, I encountered a large hard lump. An ice cold pod the size of a grapefruit. Pulling it out I found myself holding a frozen black heart that practically screamed with demonic evil. I threw it straight up into the air overhead and called to Kirby in my head. My mental cry was answered with the mother of all raptor shrieks as the giant, cloudy-dark form of the God’s Hawk flashed into our realm of existence, snatched the demon heart in a talon that could have been at home on the end of a logger’s Cherry picker, and blinked back out of the sky. All told, the whole exchange took a shade over two seconds.

Everyone around me was frozen in place, staring with eyes wide, even the two remaining Cheenos that had just crawled to the top of the leaf strewn tree trunks they had knocked over to breach the wards.

A number of things happened at the same time as the others unfroze. The moon chose that moment to break over the edge of the forest, its cold white light making the resort daytime bright to my enhanced vision. Jake, in his circle, Changed, screaming with pain as his limbs and body first deconstructed then rebuilt into something new. Britta, who had moved closer to the circle that held Jake, screamed and whirled toward him, her right foot scuffing the salt line that made up the magic circle. At the same time, both Cheenos moved forward twenty feet in a blur, keeping all Grim’s attention on them.

I moved to intercept the closest monster, but they moved as a team, each as fast as I. There are tricks to fighting multiple opponents at the same time, but it is very difficult to prevail against coordinated fighters. But I didn’t have to win, I just needed to stall.

Darting closer to the fire, I grabbed two rounds of firewood, each oak and each about a foot in diameter. The one in my right hand got flung at the far ghoul, who jumped aside with liquid ease. That freed up both hands to piston fire the second chunk like a super dense medicine ball. The distance was shorter and the speed greater, so the monster closest to me had to work a bit harder to dodge the projectile. Grim’s throw was slightly off center, coming closer to the monster’s left arm. Naturally it jumped to its right side, running into my aural whip. The lash of energy sliced across the Cheeno’s chest and abdomen, opening a deep gash that shone wetly with black intestine. The wound started to close itself almost as soon as it was made, but I was faster, using my left hand to call the monster’s digestive tract toward me. A wet rope of black innards yanked through the open wound, stopped from exiting by the self-zipping wound, which in turn was kept from closing by the hose of guts. I didn’t know a lot about Cheenos or Wendigos but I learned something that night….they hate having their guts ripped out!

The seven foot ghoul screamed in agony, then lowered its hate filled gaze and charged. My left hand yanked again on the intestine leash, succeeding in pulling them out far enough to trip the Cheeno.

That was as far as I got with that one, as a freight train suddenly ran me over. The third Cheeno went right over me, slashing with one set of razor claws. Fire flashed across my back as I ate dirt. But the weight was momentary, as the monster kept running straight for the circle that was now broken. The vulnerable werewolf at its center was still finishing his Change.

I bounced to my feet, but was too far away to catch up with the awful speed of the Cheeno. It leapt for the circle, mouth agape and ready to rend. A brown and black blur met it in mid-air, Awasos in wolf form speeding to intercept the demonic ghoul. The wolf was smaller than the demon, but that was only momentary, because as soon as his hind feet left the ground, Awasos Changed. The big wolf became a much bigger bear and the Cheeno was knocked completely away from the circle by a half ton of grizzly. Bones crunched and flesh shredded as my were bear-wolf indulged himself in a rare blood frenzy. The gray monster literally disappeared in multiple sprays of flesh and black blood.

Behind me, Jake stood unsteadily on four heavy feet, shook himself and began to move unerringly toward Britta and the breach in the circle. Gaining speed with every step, the young were charged right out of the circle, knocked the blonde teen over on his way and darted into the forest. The gutted Cheeno screeched at the disappearing were, completely ignoring the fate of his fellow demon. It slashed the rope of its own intestines away with one set of horrid claws, then leapt after the running wolf, even as its stomach finished healing. Moving much faster than the wolf it sped into the forest. A black-haired, blue-eyed blur sailed past me at full vampire speed, chasing the monster that was chasing the wolf.

Moving over to the bear and the dripping black mess he had made of the Cheeno, I reached into the mush and groped for the frozen heart. “Help Tanya!” I said to Awasos. He slapped the skull of the ghoul, crushing it flat with one giant paw, then changed form to the faster wolf shape and flashed after my vampire.

I wasted no time in finding the demonic seed in the ruins of the Cheeno’s chest, hoisting it high and calling Kirby in my mind.

The giant bird flashed in, grabbed the Cheeno heart and flashed back out, leaving me free to race after my bear-wolf and mate.

Chapter 17

The trail was clear. Jake’s wolf form wasn’t the most graceful of weres and he had to weigh close to 400 pounds. Smashed logs, broken saplings and piles of leaves that looked bulldozed led me along his trail. The three supernaturals following him left much less evidence but small signs of their passage were still visible. In the thirty seconds it had taken me to deliver the other Cheeno into Kirby’s iron grip, Jake had managed to cover the better part of a third of a mile through the thick forest.

I caught up to the group just before the big swamp. Sometime in the past few years, a storm of some type had blown over a pair of old pine trees. Their root bases had been wide but shallow and when they got ripped from the ground, the root structures had formed giant discs that stuck straight up twenty feet, forming a wall of sorts that the new werewolf hadn’t had time to get past. Jake was on the far side of the little clearing near the base of the root bundles, guarded by the smaller wolf form of Awasos. Smaller doesn’t always mean weaker, as Awasos commands strength beyond that of normal weres. At only 250 pounds, he was still easily able to keep the bigger Jake away from the combat that was occurring twenty feet away.

The Cheeno had met my vampire and her tungsten swords and I got the distinct impression that it wasn’t enjoying the introduction even a tiny bit. Every move it made was countered at a speed that more than matched its own. Super hard, razor sharp tungsten was clipping body parts from the demon faster than it could regrow them. The whirlwind of gray monster and black-clad vampire was moving almost faster than I could follow.

The mayhem paused for a moment, the Cheeno frustrated by its inability to get at the were. I had no idea why they hungered for werewolves so much but that mystery was going to have to wait, as the monster spotted me.

It moved my way in an awful blur, Grim automatically moving up to the forefront of my consciousness to meet it. Tanya started after it, which in hindsight was likely the reaction it wanted. Stopping its forward momentum completely, it whirled to face her, actually stretching back to catch her in its claws as she barreled in our direction.

The Cheeno lunged toward my vampire, razor talons open to clasp her arms before she could regroup to swing her swords. In a micro second it became clear its intent and every possible way that the whole thing could go wrong for Tanya flashed through my head. I’m not saying that it really would have had her – my vampire is really, really good in a fight, but I wasn’t happy with the implications of her forward momentum and its grotesque athletic performance. Grim wasn’t either. Fast as all of this flowed through my head, Grim was moving.

The Cheeno was by necessity balanced on one leg, the other pointing back my way to balance its reach. I grabbed the outstretched leg in both hands and pulled, which first stopped its lunge and then started to drag it my way.

Of course, Tanya was privy to most of my thoughts, as our personal comm link had ratcheted up to full combat mode in the blink of an Elder vampire’s eye. Anticipating my action, she stepped sideways to her left, then spun counterclockwise, letting her right leg sweep over the ground as momentum did the work of turning her completely back around. Both swords swept up, around and down, the right blade cleaving the hands from the monster while the left blade snatched its head from the trunk of its neck.

My rearward pull had enough power to yank its body off the ground and my own spin sent the headless, handless carcass flying through the air to crunch into a thick beech tree. Oily black blood sprayed everywhere while the broken body convulsed on the ground, while thirty free away the needle lined mouth continued to snap and the disconnected hands clenched over and over.

The body stopped its motion when Awasos in grizz form landed on it with all four turkey-platter feet. He growled as he stepped off (actually, it was more like stepped out of) the mess. I reached into the flattened chest and pulled out the partially crushed and frozen black heart. A second later, Kirby caught the third and last demonic organ of the night and screeched in triumph as he flickered out of sight.

For a moment we all just looked at each other, then we all turned looked at the remains.

I burned the body where it lay, blasting it with aura till it came apart and blew away like sand on the beach. I can’t always muster that much power unless I’m angry, but fighting demonic monsters that consume werewolves apparently gave me the necessary motivation.

Jake tried to take off, but Awasos, back in wolf mode, brought him back in line. Jake seemed to think that because he was bigger than ‘Sos he got to be boss. My wolf disabused him of that idea right quick. Awasos was stronger, faster and had spent enough time around the New York pack to pick up the wheres and hows of establishing dominance.

We got back to the resort to find Garth and Tom burning the Cheenos on one of the big bonfires. A pall of greasy black smoke that stank of charred flesh stretched into the moonlit night. Erika and Britta were spreading salt over the two black blood soaked patches of ground where the demonic monsters died. Everyone froze when the two wolves trotted out after us, but ‘Sos simply led Jake back to the circle and lay down next to him. Jake got the idea and settled in while Quinby closed the circle with fresh salt and re-invoked it, after letting Awasos back out.

The Clevelands were gone. They had packed their stuff in a flurry and left, something about trees falling and demonic screeches in the night being too much for them. It was the first smart thing I had seen from Cleveland.

Mitch and Gordon were up and watching the cleanup with open mouths. No one had said a word to them so I took them aside and had a little chat.

“You ever hear of Wendigos?” I asked.

“Of course!” Mitch answered after glancing at his partner.

“Well those are the remains of a couple of them that lived in this forest. They’re demonic in nature and from what I can gather, are particularly dangerous to weres.”

“Weres? As in werewolves?” Gordon asked, glancing at Jake in the circle and Awasos a few yards away.

“Yeah, the Dogman sightings are based on werewolves, of which Michigan has a healthy population. This forest though has been off limits to the local packs because of the wendigos.”

“How can anything prey on werewolves?” Mitch asked, a thousand more questions bubbling behind his eyes.

“Demons can project a sort of cloak, not so much of invisibility but of ‘you don’t see me’. It effects humans, weres and vampires as far as I know.”

“How do you know, Chris? Who are you? How did these wendigos die? And vampires? ” Mitch asked in a flurry.

“I specialize in demons. I’ve done it my whole life. Some people will tell you I was chosen by God to live this life, but I don’t know. It’s just what I do. Tanya, Awasos and I are a team, we trouble shoot problems in the supernatural world,” I said with a wave at the bonfire and its greasy pall of black smoke. “And yes vampires.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening here? Who is the wolf? “ Gordon asked.

“The wolf is Jake. He’s a new were and was coming here to be secluded when the moon made him Change. His presence brought the wendigos around. They had always avoided the Boklunds before, but the draw of a young were was irresistible to them. I still don’t know why the wendigos prefer to hunt weres except that if they fed on life force then supernaturals might provide a greater dose. We didn’t know where the demons had come from or what gave them their abilities, but we are reasonably sure they have been eradicated.”

“The bird thing? That was part of the…what do you call it? Exorcism?” Mitch asked.

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “He removes them from our realm or dimension if you will and hauls them back to their own.”

“How did that thing know to come for them?” Gordon asked.

“I called him,” I answered.

“What? You have a cell phone to heaven or something?” Mitch asked, incredulous. ‘This is ridiculous.”

“You know what? You’re right. Just a big joke and now you’re on to us,” I said, standing up from the picnic table we were seated at and dusting off my pants.

“Wait, you can’t do that! You can’t tell us this fantastic story and then tell us to forget about it or provide proof,” Gordon said.

“Listen, if you want proof, just sit back and watch the wolf in the circle. In a few hours he’s gonna change back into a naked guy. But no photos!” I admonished with a finger wave. “In fact you can’t write up any of this!”

“What! Why not?” Mitch asked.

“Because the supernatural world wants to stay hidden and it protects its secrets viciously. If you try to publish any of this stuff I can’t be responsible for what happens to you,” I said.

“That’s a threat? You’re threatening us?” Mitch asked, getting angry.

“No Mitch, I’m explaining the facts of life to you. Should you try to publish this stuff, you’ll find yourselves out of jobs, with broken credit ratings and completely discredited. There are really powerful people who have a vested interest in keeping this stuff quiet. Their reach is long and deep.”

The two men exchanged glances then turned back to me.

“So that’s it? We get to watch a real werewolf turn back to human but can’t study it?” Gordon asked.

“Study all you want. Study your hearts out, but don’t take photos. Listen write it down but make your notes sound like fiction like…I don’t know…Steven King or something. That would probably be alright,”

“Write our observations like what? Science fiction? Horror?” Mitch asked.

“Sure, why not. Create a fictional investigator and pretend you’re writing novels about him. That way if anyone reads your notes they’ll think you just have vivid imaginations.”

“But no one will ever know that it’s real!” Gordon protested.

“That’s the point. How much of your research have you published so far?”

“Well, none of it. We haven’t exactly found proof till now,” Mitch answered.

“So do you think a series of photos or a video will be considered proof by anyone? The modern world loves supernatural fiction, but it’s not remotely ready for the real deal,” I told them.

I spent a few more minutes with the professors then went looking for Tanya. I found her in our cabin cleaning with a ferocious energy.

“Whatcha doing that for? They said it only needed to be broom swept,” I asked as I watched her vacuum.

“They’re witches Chris. Do you want to leave hair and other DNA stuff around for them to cast sympathetic magic with?” she asked.

“Oh, hadn’t thought of that,” I answered.

“That’s cause they’re pretty blondes. But the mother is scared to death of us, the love struck daughter will protect her werewolf and the other one would likely try and cast a love spell on you,” she said, pulling out the vacuum’s bag. “Here, burn this in our fire while I grab the sheets.”

The flames flared around the paper vacuum bag and the smoke smelled like burning hair. I stirred the fire with a poker stick making sure everything was burned. As I gazed into the coals my phone rang. The caller id told me it was my grandfather.

“Hey what’s up Gramps?” I answered.

“Chris, it’s Len,” said the voice of my grandfather’s right hand man.

“Len? What’s up? Where’s Gramps?” I asked, Cheenos and witches already forgotten.

“Chris, you need to come home, your grandfather’s in the hospital,” he said, gravely.

An hour later, we pulled away from the resort, having assured ourselves that Jake would be alright and telling the Boklunds that I had a family emergency. Quinby wasn’t unhappy to see us go, but I think she meant it when she wished my grandfather a rapid recovery.

***

The fastest way home to Gramps, short of a private jet, was to cross into Canada, traverse the southern portion just above the Great Lakes and come back down into New York State at Ogdensburg or maybe Massena. The closest border crossing was at Sault Sainte Marie on the northeastern edge of the Upper Pennisula, so we headed there, Tanya driving while I called Len for more details.

Fast closing in on eighty years of age, Len wasn’t overly comfortable with cell phones and so our conversation was short. Gramps had collapsed at the breakfast table, clutching his chest in the classic sign of a heart attack. The ambulance had taken him to Potsdam hospital where he was being treated, but Len didn’t know anything new, leaving me completely without answers.

Gramps was my only remaining family and now I didn’t know if he would survive till I got there. A slim white hand with the strength of a hydraulic clamp gently took my own as images of my grandfather flickered through my head.

Chapter 18

It took a half hour to get to Munising then a little less than two hours more to get to the border station at Sault Sainte Marie. It was still dark, early morning, but the crossing ahead seemed to be teeming with trucks and cars. Business people and truck drivers getting an early start.

“We’ll need our passports,” Tanya said, breaking my two hour plus reverie. Those were the first words spoken in the SUV since leaving the resort. Oddly, that was okay. Trying to tell me everything would be alright or that Gramps would be fine would have been a useless gesture. Gramps was in his seventies and I knew he wouldn’t live forever. It’s just I hadn’t expected any problems at this stage of the game.

He was healthy as a horse the last time I’d seen him. I say that not just because he appeared to be fit and hale, but because he smelled healthy, both to me and Tanya. People with health issues give off a different scent, one that vampires are uniquely tuned to. Like the wolf pack that senses a sickly elk, vampires will instinctively gravitate toward the seriously ill. Which, when you think about is speaks to a more natural predator-prey relationship between vamps and humans.

But Tanya had made a point to reassure me about his state of health last time we’d been home. For a man in his seventies, Alex Gordon had the muscle tone and heart rate of a man fifteen years younger. Farm life, even with modern equipment, is guaranteed to keep your weight down and your fitness up. So I was really surprised that he’d had a sudden heart attack.

“We don’t know that he did have a heart attack,” Tanya noted, doing that mind reading thing again. I sorta expect it now.

“No we don’t, but based on what Len said, that seems most likely,” I said, unzipping the document pouch to get at the passports.

The line of vehicles heading onto the International Bridge to Canada had been moving right along, but now slowed to a crawl.

“Damn it! What’s the hold up?” I said, angry at the delay.

We inched forward for another few minutes, approaching what appeared to be an irregular checkpoint set up on the long stretch of road approaching the Border Patrol building. Several cruisers were parked in such a manner to create a bottleneck, forcing cars through one at a time.

“That’s odd, they’re checking cars on the U.S. side?” Tanya noted. “Ones leaving the country, not entering.”

A burly officer in uniform, waved the car ahead of us through the checkpoint, his eyes focused on us.

“Uh oh! I don’t like this too much,” I said. Behind me Awasos growled his agreement.

Hard, flint gray eyes stared holes through our vehicle as he held both arms up in a command to stop. Tanya powered down her window and hit him with a million watt smile.

“Hi officer,” she said brightly. Most men melted before she got to ‘hi’. This guy didn’t change expression. About then I noticed his uniform was slightly different from the standard Border Patrol design. First it wasn’t olive green, but jet black. And second, the guy had his sidearm holstered in a thigh holster, like some kind of SWAT team Tommy Tactical. The gun itself was a Glock .45 not the Patrol’s issue HK P2000. His insignia was different as well, with the main symbol being a set of crossed black swords under the capital letters A.I.R. The whole thing was subdued in color, as was the name patch that just read GLADIUS, no rank anywhere on his uniform. He had some type of rifle slung across his back.

I noticed all of that in the moment before he firmly directed us out of the line of cars and over to a pair of black Humvees that had the same logo on the door panels. Tanya pulled the car to a stop at the direction of another black clad agent, this one an equally serious blonde. Six other agents stepped out around the car with rifles held directly on us.

“They don’t look happy to see us,” I said, trying to get a look at the rifles. I couldn’t identify them which bothered me on a lot of levels.

The rifle wielders were all in full body armor and tactical gear, although it was subtly different somehow. They all had matching deadly serious stares and very odd rifles.

Standing back by fifteen yards or so was a second group of agents, these all attired in the regular Border Patrol olive green and armed with M4 assault rifles.

“GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE AND LIE ON THE GROUND!” the blond woman screamed. We didn’t need to glance at each other, but we both paused to think about it, our brains running at hyper speed, our link suddenly at full combat mode. After a moment, we simultaneously turned to our doors and popped them open with the exact same motion. Like mirror images, we both knelt on the pavement then dropped to our stomachs.

“PLACE BOTH HANDS ON YOUR HEADS!” was the next command.

No sooner had we done so when hard knees landed on our backs and strong hands pulled our wrists down to the small of our backs to be cuffed, while a pair of odd rifle barrels pressed against each of our heads.

I could simultaneously feel the barrels on my head and the ones on Tanya’s, but it was the feeling of the hands that triggered the memory. When I say they were strong, I’m talking vampire strong, not human. The attack on me and Toni last fall popped clearly into my head. Those attackers had moved with greater than human speed.

“Your cuffs are made with depleted uranium. Hers are silvered steel. Our weapons don’t use chemical propellants and are loaded with alternating silver and DU rounds. Twitch and we will literally blow you to bits. NOW GET UP!” said the female agent.

Our brains were running in parallel. There were multiple opportunities to counter, escape and attack. We rejected each one, simultaneously arriving at the conclusion that this was going to be a learning experience. We hoped the wait would be rewarded.

Flexing our prone bodies, we both popped to our feet, without any normal in between steps like kneeling. The sudden motion flustered our captors for a split second, then the surprise turned to anger and the hardened barrels of their odd weapons smacked into us in reprisal. Awasos growled from inside the SUV, but a look from each of us stopped his response before it started.

Two ‘agents’ slammed the front doors shut, then signaled to someone else. Instantly heavy diesel engines revved and a four-pack of bright yellow adult-sized Tonka toys moved up from every direction. Two D7 Caterpillar bulldozers came up from each side of the Tahoe, giant steel blades pressing against each set of doors. A smaller Kimatsu bucket loader pulled up to the back of the car and blocked the tailgate doors. The final rig was a very large front end loader, the kind that villages use to remove snow from clogged roads in the winter. It rolled behind one of the dozers and lowered its massive bucket onto the roof of the SUV effectively completing Awasos’s makeshift prison.

All four heavy pieces of equipment rocked slightly as our were bear wolf vented his rage in a roar that turned heads in every part of the busy Border station.

“Sos!” I said at slightly louder than normal speaking level.

The rocking of the enclosed SUV slowed and the roars lessened to a dull growl.

“Smart, ‘cause if he gives us any grief, we’ll just crush him where he is!” the blonde agent said.

Her nametag said BLADE. The others were just as edgy. SHIV, BOWIE, KATANA, TANTO were all there as well as a tall lanky guy named KRISS. I sensed a theme.

Gladius led us into the building, ignoring the regular border agents who moved out of our little group’s way with puzzled looks.

We threaded through several sets of doors, finally entering an interrogation room that came complete with a one-way mirrored wall. A desk with two steel chairs in front of it occupied one end of the room. A man with thinning brown hair and a dark suit sat behind the desk, watching us coldly. I recognized him.

“Agent Gentis, what brings you to Michigan?” I asked. I had only met him once, on the campus of Columbia University when he had tried to bring me in for questioning. General Creek had sent him packing, but now here he was, a long way from New York, with a squad of paramilitary agents who reminded me strongly of the black ops unit that attempted to snatch me and my goddaughter.

Gladius and Blade roughly shoved my vampire and me into the steel chairs, while two of the others took up position behind and slightly to the left of us, gun barrels pressed to the junction of neck and head. The other agents took up position to around the room, mostly behind us.

“Chris Gordon and …Tatiana Demidova,” Gentis said, looking at our passports, then making a show of writing our names on an official looking form. The black clad guards around us were almost vibrating with alertness as they watched us for movement.

“Both persons of interest attempting to leave the country,” he said aloud as he wrote the same words on another line of the form.

“Yeah, about that, I need to get to my grandfather,” I said. He ignored me.

“Transporting a dangerous wolf hybrid, multiple edged weapons,” he said, still looking down and writing.

“Chris, isn’t it odd that this ….agent,” Tanya started, making agent sound like an insult to the word, “…found us here – at the border? I mean we didn’t even know we were coming here till you got that call.”

Gentis glanced up at her but she kept her attention on me.

“I never told you this, but I had your grandfather’s medical records lifted and copied last time we were visiting him,” she said. “Doc S looked through them and told me your Gramps was healthy as a horse, absolutely no sign of heart disease or diabetes, cancer or any other major disease. Quite remarkable was the term he used.”

“You think that he engineered a heart attack knowing this would be the place we would show up as the fastest route home from anywhere in the Upper Peninsula?” I asked, not really surprised that she had creeped on Gramps medical condition. Few humans mean much to Tanya but those that do are the focus of intense affection.

I was starting to get really angry though.

“That’s exactly what I think, and I also think these bozos are the same type that hurt Toni,” she said offhandedly.

She was right and I was suddenly homicidally angry. Grim angry.

“So now that you have ‘Brutal Asset’ what’s your nefarious plan? Secret lab, dissection?” she asked Gentis, whose face reflected a small amount of admiration for her intelligence.

“Well, Miss Demidova, I must say, I am impressed. Beauty and brains. How rare. And you know of us…the Agentes in Rebus?”

We glanced at each other, then she answered him. “Well we knew of you, but we didn’t know your little organization’s title,” she said. “Those who are involved in Matters? Is that how that translates?”

His adimiration was slightly more sincere.

“Educated in the classics. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, based on the average age of your tutors,” he said.

“So you’re what? The Roman Empire’s secret police?” she asked. I didn’t recognize the name of his group, but it obviously fit somewhere in Tanya’s knowledge base. I never spent much time on history, being more interested in learning the practical arts of survival.

He frowned, then chuckled. “No, we borrowed the name as it fits our role here in America. You see Miss Demidova, we live in the greatest nation on earth, but our forefathers left some glaring gaps in the structure of the government. Four to eight years in office is far too short a time frame for our leaders to secure this country’s borders and interests. Administrations turn over too quickly, leaving too many jobs undone,” he said, warming to his monologue. “Our organization was formed over a hundred years ago by patriots who saw the very few mistakes that the founding fathers had made.”

“Let me guess. A.I.R. hides away in the cracks and crevices of the government and runs operations to protect the country?” Tanya guessed.

“Much too simple a summary Miss Demidova,” he responded like a pompous professor. “We influence things at all levels. A word here, a grant there, a stern reminder when necessary, that’s much of what we do. But we also have an active element, one that takes the fight to our enemies where ever they may be.”

He waved a hand at the black unformed troops standing behind us. “We have the best operators in the world and the fortitude to use them. The group behind you is responsible for eliminating more Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders than the entire hunter-killer drone program, we just can’t advertise that”.

“So why are you poisoning old soldiers that fought for this country?” Tanya asked.

“Mr. Gordon’s service to his country is duly noted, but we do what we must. Our mission requires that we have the best of everything, from the gauss rifle prototypes that you see here to the Centurion class operatives that wield them. Our people are faster and stronger than our enemies because we’ve learned to harvest the proteins that give your people their abilities. But your boyfriend here is another level altogether, although I must say that you, yourself, may add a dimension or two to our studies,” he said with a smirk.

“So where do you fit in with this group, Agent Gentis? Pretty far down the ranks I’d guess,” Tanya said.

He frowned at her. “Actually, I occupy a rare position, with quite a bit of power and latitude, Miss Demidova. I’m empowered to make decisions in the field…life and death decisions.”

She studied him for a second or two then shook her head. “No I don’t buy it. I think you’re in the position of the goat in a tiger hunt. You know—the goat that gets staked out to be killed by the tiger?”

“You’re much more of a mental opponent than I had envisioned. I thought Gordon here was the mouthy one?” he said, frowning at me.

“Oh, he is, Agent Gentis, by far. Except when he’s really, really angry. It seems to me that everyone would have figured out by now that pushing him and making him angry ends up with him another level stronger and the pushers….well….dead!”

I had tried mono blading my wrists to cut the cuffs but the blades wouldn’t form. Of course, it was only steel with a DU coating so the whole time I had been sitting there, I’d been stretching the steel, pressing with constant, very slow pressure. Now, I just pulled my left wrist free, grabbed the metal seat back behind me and crushed the chair.

It shouldn’t have been possible, there wasn’t any natural way to get any leverage to pull down, but vampire energy methods make the impossible possible. I Posted to the floor through the soles of my feet, then Pulled both with my legs and with energy, dropping into a squat. My left hand shot up and grabbed the barrel of the rifle, pulling it down toward Gentis while I crouched low as the steel chair was crushed flat like a soda can. My right hand grabbed my guard’s leg and pulled it from under him.

The gauss rifle made a high pitched whine then a super loud crack as the depleted uranium round left the barrel at six or seven times the speed of sound, blasted through the air just above Gentis’s head and blew through the building behind it as if the bricks didn’t exist.

My grip crushed the barrel then let go, which was good, because the next shot blew the gun all apart, taking a sizeable portion of the guard’s right hand and forearm with it.

While I was playing with new toys, Tanya had been busy. She went up instead of down, jumping into a back flip, circling her bound hands under her tucked feet even as she came down behind her very surprised guard. His shock was cut short by her bound wrists which went under his chin, against his throat, then broke his neck and back as he performed an impossible back bend at her insistence.

My crushed chair wasn’t very much use to me anymore so I threw it like a Frisbee at one of the guards in the back of the room. Then I raced it to see which of us got to the guards first. I’ll call it a tie, though if I’m honest, the chair might have won by a centimeter. It took the blonde guard, Blade, off her feet and part way through the wall. I sent Katana along beside her with a straight arm to his sternum, which collapsed before it met the wall. A glance to my left found the other two guards dead, one draped through the now broken mirror glass into the empty observation room. My girlfriend was standing between them with blood on both bound hands.

Gentis was crouched behind his desk, shocked, his hand covering the ear on the side of his that the gauss round had passed. Probably a busted eardrum from having a hypersonic projectile pass next to it.

“Wow, Gentis, these new guns are cool!” Grim said using my voice, while I ripped Tanya’s cuffs apart.

Picking up a Gauss rifle, I examined it. Blocky and overly heavy, it was packed with batteries, transformers, and the barrel was ringed with coils. Like a railgun, it used magnetic fields to accelerate a projectile much faster than chemical propellants could, pushing the kinetic energy of each round to explosive levels. The thing had to weigh thirty pounds making it unsuitable for most troops but these had been much stronger than normal humans. Still, even at thirty pounds it was a technological achievement. I was most likely holding the future of combat weapon craft in my hands.

Tanya blurred across the room, scooped Gentis up by his neck and slammed him down on the desk top. Her face was frozen and cold –beautiful but cold.

“What are those soldiers?” she asked, her voiced pitched for compliance.

A wet stain appeared on Gentis’s crotch as he answered in a shrill and shaky voice.

“Human soldiers, treated with an enhancement drug.”

“And where does this drug come from?”

“Vampires. The idea came from the Hance drug that hit the streets a few years back. But this is just a mélange of proteins and enzymes, purified from vampire blood.”

“How do you get it?” she asked, her voice scary even to me and I was on her side.

“W…wee..we’ve captured a few vampires over the y-years,” he replied.

She studied him for a second, then bit, faster than thought. His legs kicked for a moment before he passed out. She drank for a second or two, then stopped, wiping her mouth with the back of one hand. She glanced at me and grimaced.

“He pissed me off,” she said, looking just slightly chagrined at her own actions.

“How was it?” I asked in my own voice.

“Sour,” was her answer.

***

Leaving the customs station wasn’t as easy as escaping Gentis. Mostly because we both agreed we should avoid hurting any real law enforcement types or any civilians.

Our first order of business was freeing Awasos, but when we left the customs building we found the Kubota tractor that had blocked the rear of the car was flipped on its side and the back of the SUV was ripped open. The other pieces of equipment showed damage; metal operator cages shredded, engine cowlings smashed, and in the case of the giant front-end loader, one of the massive tires was destroyed.

An enraged roar told us where our were bear was, about eighty yards away, between the bridge to Canada and the customs building. We raced at vampire speed but just as we arrived two Border Patrol agents opened fire on ‘Sos with M4 rifles on full auto.

My bear cowered in the face of the gunfire and I flipped out. Completely. One massive aura burst left my body and every loaded firearm in a two hundred yard radius exploded. Holstered, held in hands or left in vehicles, it didn’t matter. The cartridges all simultaneously fired, blasting out the bottom of grips, bursting metal magazines, jamming actions and barrels. In that one instant it was over. Except for the panicked screams of the travelers and the cries of pain and shock from the agents, the action was done. The crunch of fenders and bumpers smacking each other was loud and clear as panicked travelers sought to get over the bridge and away from the violence at the border station.

Awasos was already healing from the bullet wounds as we led him away from the chaos my little trick had caused.

“That’s a new one,” Tanya commented.

“Yeah, I didn’t know that was a possibility. Grim came up with it,” I said.

“Your Grim side has a real genius for mayhem,” she said with admiration, which oddly made me slightly jealous, which was stupid. Grim is me and I am Grim. As I thought this, Tanya grabbed my hand and smiled. “Two sides to the same coin,” she said.

We walked toward the bridge, Awasos shifting to wolf form, all the expended bullets that had been in his larger bear form falling out on the ground as he lost mass.

Chapter 19

Crossing the bridge on foot wasn’t tough. The Canadian Border guards had stopped entry and the bridge was full of idling vehicles, many of the drivers standing outside their rides trying to get a look at the chaos behind us.

We moved through the vehicles as casually as we could. People asked questions and we got our share of attention. More than our share, especially from men staring at my girl. Having a giant wolf trotting beside us didn’t help with the blending in. We answered the questions as generally as possible while asking about the hold up ahead. Tanya got lots of answers and more than a few offers for a ride.

The gist of the information was that the Canadians were locked down, having been contacted by their U.S. counterparts about possible terrorists. While we walked, we could see the activity pick up ahead of us. Two patrol boats left the docks and pulled out onto the river with searchlights lit up and roving. We could hear a helicopter approaching from the north and as soon as we saw its blinking lights in the night sky, we knew it was time to get off the bridge.

The International Bridge has suspension towers anchored to the banks of the river that flows underneath it. We slipped over the side and climbed down, moving at a speed that would be hard to see by any watching law enforcement. I thought about carrying Awasos, but he changed form, becoming something closer to a black bear than a grizzly, his new shape easily handling the climb.

A Canadian police cruiser was parked near the bottom with two alert patrolmen running their high powered flashlights over the tower and its base. After jumping the last fifty feet and landing behind them, it wasn’t hard to put them in rear neck chokes and when they passed out, we cuffed them, left them in at the bottom of the tower and borrowed their car.

We simply drove away from the border, our official vehicle giving us a free visa to enter the country. Leaving the cruiser at a Tim Hortons donut shop, we continued walking while Tanya called a local number on the cell phone she had ‘borrowed’ from one of the cops. Awasos and I were occupied with the very important task of eating two dozen donuts. Ideally it would be a dozen for each of us, but we both knew that someone large and furry would end up with a bit more than his share.

Twenty minutes later, a cable television van picked us up and took us to a Coven safe house where we were offered clean clothes and more food (blood in Tanya’s case) while the next step was laid out.

The vampire who seemed to be in charge was a tall black woman named Bettina. Her expression was guarded as she provided for our needs then helped plan our next steps.

“We have a makeup specialist on hand to change your appearances. We’ll send you across the border separately, mixed in with other groups,” she explained.

“What about ID?” I asked.

“You’ll have valid Canadian passports. We’re mixing you into a busload of older tourists heading into New York State.”

“What about Awasos?” I asked, patting my furry pal where he lay pressed up against my feet.

“He’ll have to stay put for now. He’s too big and wolf-like to not be noticed.”

“Why don’t we just swim the Saint Lawrence river?” I asked, curious.

Bettina sighed, glanced at Tanya with a ‘is he for real?’ look and then answered.

“Because Chris, the US/Canadian border just became the most heavily observed point on earth. We know of at least two satellites and seven drones being assigned to watch this section and that’s a conservative estimate. The 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in Watertown has been brought out to patrol the US side and the Mounties have tripled their presence in Ottawa, Cornwall and Montreal.”

I looked down at my bear-wolf and still thought it could be done. His brown eyes flashed lava red for a moment as he grinned back at me. Good luck holding him here, I thought to myself.

Tanya snorted, watching the byplay between man and were beast, then turned to Bettina.

“When do we get started?”

Downstairs, we heard the door open and voices murmur greetings. Bettina cocked her head listening then grinned. “Right now!”

It took two hours to get each of us fully made up, which according to Rick the human makeup expert and his assistant, Lisa, was fast.

Custom prosthetics, commissioned by Lydia months ago and shipped to various safe houses and dental gauze packed into our cheeks changed our face structure while contact lenses altered our very noticeable eyes. I watched my beautiful vampire age before my eyes in a manner that would never actually happen, even if she lived for millennia. Her hair was now a bluish grey and her perfect white skin had become yellowed, wrinkled and spotted with age blemishes. Prosthetic teeth that were crooked and stained covered her natural ones. Her unnatural ability to mimic others changed her whole persona to someone elderly who had entered her twilight years hobbled with arthritis along with the aches and pains of a lifetime.

She would have fooled anyone. Looking at her it was only my mental link to her that told me she was still there under all those layers of flowered cloth and sweaters.

My own reflection was hard to reconcile. I was balding and bent, wrinkled and weathered, wearing a smelly sweater and baggy trousers two sizes too big. Rick had used athletic tape to fasten a wooden ruler behind my left knee, which forced me to walk with a stiff legged limp. He had duct taped the skin on my back so that if I tried to straighten up it pulled sharply. The overall effect was a hunched over, limping walk that I couldn’t forget to maintain. Then after petting a whining Awasos goodbye, we boarded a tour bus with passports in hand. I studied mine, learning that I was Peter Duluth, from Ottawa, I would be eighty-one in August and I had last crossed the border a month and a half ago. Bettina had assured us that our passports were real and that the new photos that were taken and affixed in place would be uploaded to the Canadian computers before we got our seatbelts on. The Coven was as firmly entrenched in the Canadian government as it was everywhere else.

The rest happened rather quickly. We pulled up to the heavily manned border, then stopped while US Border officers boarded the bus. I woke the old guy next to me who had been asleep when I got on and we both produced our passports on demand, which were scanned with a reader. Apparently, Bettina was as good as her word, because the Duluth passport passed inspection with ease.

Six rows behind me I could feel Tanya suddenly tense up and I glanced forward to see what had alarmed her. A female agent with a hundred pounds of Doberman had climbed up and was moving down the aisle, letting her dog sniff everyone on the bus. Vampires definitely smell different to dogs, so I was suddenly just as nervous as she was. The dog came along side me then stopped, pausing to snuffle my hands. The handler watched suspiciously, and when the dog started to push its nose into my lap I thought the game was up. Then I noticed the wagging tail and the doggy grin as my new friend demanded attention and I realized it was my God given gift that had caught the Dobie’s interest. I never met a dog that didn’t like me, that wasn’t in fact almost crazy about me. This one was no different and despite repeated commands, the Doberman continued to come back to me. She would get two rows down the aisle and the happy brute would suddenly swing around and fly back to me. Her annoyed handler finally gave up and yanked her back to the front and off the bus without completing her sweep. A quick glance at my elderly Tanya showed her relief in the gleam of her contact browned eye. Then the door closed, the bus driver shifted into gear and we headed into the U.S.

The doors reopened at the Akwasasne Casino in Massena. We hobbled into the main casino with the rest of the group but continued right out the back and into the parking lot behind the building. A late model, silver Honda Accord answered the key fob that Tanya produced from her granny purse and we were off.

***

Thirty-five minutes later we pulled open the doors to the Canton-Potsdam hospital and hobbled our elderly selves in. We had decided to leave the disguises on and it proved to be the right decision as there were multiple dark suited men loitering around the hospital and one parked right outside the door to Gramps room.

No immediate plan came to mind so we collapsed ourselves into a couple of chairs in the hospital cafeteria to think about it. The solution to our problem found us drinking coffee.

“Wow, life on the road hasn’t treated you well!” a familiar voice said behind me.

The tall black haired man and his pretty, athletic girlfriend were looking at us with bemused grins.

Brett Malleck and his mate, Kelly pulled up chairs and greeted us like we were old friends of the family, which we were.

“We got ten feet in the door and both smelled your scents everywhere. That’s a nice look for you Chris and the scent of mothballs and Ben-Gay ointment really suits you,” the tall Alpha said with a grin. “But you, Tanya, are going to be breaking hearts in the senior center with that look!”

“Asshole!” I said, laughing despite my worries about Gramps.

“So what’s the drill?” Kelly asked.

“We haven’t gotten near him yet,” I said with a shrug.

“Come in with us. You’re old friends of Alex Gordon’s and you’re visiting at the same time as his concerned neighbors. The DHS agents all know who we are, thanks to your good friend General Creek, and he’s been getting lots of visitors.”

“How is he?” I asked, unable to contain my fear.

“He’s really good. The doctors are a little baffled. He may have had a slight heart attack, but they’re not finding any real damage.”

I exchanged glances with Tanya.

“We have reason to believe that he was given a drug that made it look like he had a heart attack,” Tanya said.

“Why?” Brett asked.

We spent the next few minutes explaining the last twenty- six or so hours and our run in with A.I.R.

“So why don’t you just contact Gina or the General?” Brett asked.

“Because they don’t know if they can trust them!” Kelly guessed.

“Not to mention we sorta damaged federal property and killed six people who were wearing the uniforms of federal agents,” I said. “I think Creek frowns on that kind of thing.”

“Our goal is to make sure that Chris’s grandfather is okay, then we’ll think about talking to Gina…maybe,” Tanya said.

The two young Alphas looked at each other than nodded at us. “Okay, old man, let’s go see the old man,” Brett said to me.

Chapter 20

Seeing my undefeatable grandfather propped up in a state of the art hospital bed with I.V. tubes and heart rate monitors attached was a stranger sight than seeing a pack of werewolves Change under a full moon.

My entire life, as long as I can remember, Alex Gordon had been the epitome of health. The single most solid part of my life was looking vulnerable and, well, kind of old.

Sure, I knew that Gramps was in his seventies, which wasn’t young, but just a few months ago I had watched him crawl under a tractor to change the oil, dropping down and squirming like a thirty or forty-year old might. Now he was sitting in bed, scraping the last of his applesauce from a little disposable cup, his shaky right hand sprouting an I.V. tube.

He nodded at Brett and smiled warmly at Kelly then glanced our way with curiosity on his face.

“You look better than Len led me to believe you would be,” I said in my normal voice. His eyes narrowed for a split second, then recognition smoothed out his brow.

“Actually, I look a whole lot better than you do!” he said with a grin. Then he pushed my hand aside to take Tanya’s. “But you, my dear, would be the hit of the coffee club!”

Tanya gave him a sudden hug, moving much faster than a lady her supposed age could manage. Slightly faster than a bantam-weight boxer could manage, in fact.

He looked over her shoulder at me with wide eyes that were suspiciously moist, then laughed, patting her back with affection.

“The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” he said.

“You must be okay, if you’re quoting Twain,” I said.

“Honestly, I feel fine. The doctors can’t find anything wrong with me, and in fact, they aren’t even sure I had an attack,” he said.

“We think you were attacked,” I said.

He looked at me in confusion for a second or two, then a light dawned in his eyes.

“Drugs?” he asked.

“So we think,” said Tanya, who moved to the other side of his bed and was inspecting his lunch. She sniffed his glass of red juice and met my eyes. “Cranberry,” she said, something brewing in her mind. Gramps glanced back my way. “Explain,” he demanded.

So I did, which kept him occupied while Tanya ghosted around the room. Gramps watched her poking in drawers of supplies, but never saw her snatch a disposable lancet. Never saw the drop of blood from her index finger go into his juice, which she made sure he drank as she fussed around his bed. Gramps doesn’t know her well enough to realize she is not a bed fusser.

I finished my narrative as he finished his juice and he was already visibly healthier. He was also only the second person to ever receive the gift of Tanya’s blood. Vampire blood, if given to a human, has amazing health benefits. The older and stronger the donor vamp is, the more powerful the effect is. Cancer, Aids, Alzheimer’s, heck, even old age itself could all be cured by vampire blood. Tanya’s is the absolute purest on the planet, a result of never having been human, but instead born into the vampire world.

I could practically hear his heartbeat strengthen as we talked.

“So…what next?” he asked me. I could tell he was already thinking up ideas and answers to that very question, but our relationship was ever his teacher to my student.

“Well, now that I know you’re okay, I’ll have to set about contacting Gina if I’m going to have a chance to clear the record.”

The door to the room opened behind us and a pretty brunette with dark brown eyes regarded us evenly.

“There, see? My plan is already coming together!” I said in Gramp’s direction. “Hi Gina.”

“Chris, Tanya. Hello Mr. Gordon. Brett, Kelly. How is everyone?” she asked with a slight smile.

“You bugged the room,” my grandfather said, more of a statement than a question.

“Yes. I told General Creek that it wasn’t a matter of if you would be here, but when,” she said.

“He got all up in arms about securing the border, guards on the hospital, stuff like that. I told him none of it would make any of difference, that you would get past anything he could set up. I think it offends his sense of professional pride that you two would slide by all his gadgets and people. Hey, where’s your third? Where’s Awasos?”

“We left him in Canada, but I would expect him pretty soon,” I said. “Should we be worried about the guard outside the door?”

“I dismissed him and the others. The General should have known better. What was he going to do? Confront you with agents in the middle of a hospital?” she asked, with a shoulder shrug.

“He’s listening right now, isn’t he?” Gramps guessed.

She smiled a sly smile and nodded once, happy that she could use this time to say ‘I told you so’ without doing it face to face.

“So, you heard our story, right?” I asked.

“Yes, and it fits with wreckage you left in Saulte Saint Marie.”

“What about Gentis? Has he told you anything?” Tanya asked.

“Gentis is dead,” Gina said, her expression severe.

“He was alive when we left him,” Tanya said defensively.

“Are you sure? Cause he looked to have a couple of large wounds on his neck when I saw him,” Gina said, staring hard at Tanya.

Tanya swore and yanked off her wig, peeling more of her disguise off, the thick cloth tearing like tissue paper.

My link told me she had become a cauldron of emotion when Gina implied that Gentis had died from his bite wounds. She has issues about biting people to death, which would be odd for any vampire, let alone her. She was simultaneously angry and guilty.

Not many people, vampire, human or were would be comfortable pushing Tanya to that level of anger, but Gina seemed unconcerned.

“So what killed him?” I asked, guessing that it wasn’t my vampire’s bite.

“We don’t know for certain. Poison most likely, but we don’t think it was self-inflicted. Possibly a remote signal to an implant. We’ll know more when the complete autopsy is finished,” she said, still watching Tanya.

At Gina’s words, Tanya stopped shredding her outer clothes, which part of me was sad about, because I was curious as to what she had on underneath. Brett seemed to feel the same way up until the point where Kelly stepped on his foot.

Tanya straightened and turned to look at Gina, comprehension flickering on her face.

“Fuck you Gina,” she said evenly.

“Right back at you Tanya,” Gina said, living dangerously. “You are, for all intents and purposes, godmother to my daughter. If you’re suddenly biting everything that moves, I sorta need to know about it. I’m not an empath. How am I supposed to know how you feel about it.”

I had moved just slightly to intervene if my vampire snapped, but now my link told me she had calmed down at the mention of being a godmother. It also told me that she felt guilty about losing her temper and biting Gentis in the first place.

“So now I can be fairly certain it was something you were driven to and not a regular thing,” Gina said, arms still crossed over her chest. Gina is, without a doubt, the single bravest person I’ve ever met.

“They keep pushing him and pushing. It pisses me off,” Tanya said, without looking up from the pile of clothing she was shedding. Turned out she had one of her spandexy cat suits on underneath, which distracted me from the conversation for a moment. Brett suddenly found the heart monitor fascinating as Kelly watched him with a deadly stare.

Gina’s expression softened. “I understand. I’ve told the President and General Creek that that kind of thing should be avoided.”

Tanya looked up and met her glance, then they both nodded in understanding, which left me out because of my previous spandex caused lapse of attention.

“Wait. What?” I asked.

“Never you mind, Chris. I’m not real happy with you right now. What’s up with detonating 217 federally owned firearms and wounding thirteen agents?” Gina asked, her frown turning into something of a glare.

“They were shooting my bear…I don’t really care for people shooting my bear, Gina,” I said a little sharpish. “Ah, how badly were they injured?”

“One guy lost a finger, the rest were burned and bruised. At least two had some hearing damage,” she said, staring at me. “You couldn’t have just rendered them inert? Where did the whole exploding thing come from anyway?”

“Grim,” Tanya answered before I could. “If they push, they get new results Gina…each and every time!”

Gina watched me thoughtfully while Tanya spoke, then glanced at the raven haired vampire and nodded. I ignored the looks and started pulling off my own costume, although I was going to have to live with the old man pants for the time being.

Gramps had been watching this by-play with interest, but now he spoke up. “What about these AIR guys?”

Gina looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time, then gave him a big smile, not at all like the severe look she had given me.

“We’re working on that. In fact, I brought along someone to help us with that very issue,” she said, backing to the open door and then glancing out into the hallway and to her right.

“Director? Now is fine,” she said to someone out of view.

Footsteps followed her words and a moment later a snow white head of hair on top of a spry, black suited body popped into view.

“Chris, you already know Director Stewart, but for the rest of you this is Director Nathan Stewart who heads up a special division in the intelligence world,” Gina introduced. “Director, this is Tatiana Demidova, Brett and Kelly Mallek, and Chris’s grandfather, Alex Gordon.”

Nathan Stewart was beaming, a huge ear-to-ear smile, as he shook hands. A snowy mustache matched his full head of hair, making his blue eyes look far more alert and alive than most twenty year olds. I wasn’t sure how old he was; just that he always seemed hale and hearty, except for a slight limp in his left leg. Because of the limp, he carried a slim black cane that was topped with a thick crystal of some type, although I didn’t think he really needed the cane. I had scanned both him and his assistant when Gina and I had met them several months back. My Sight had shown that his ‘assistant’ Adine Benally was a were, her body riddled with the LV virus at levels beyond any I had seen before. Oddly, Director Stewart’s injured leg was also riddled with the same virus, but nowhere else in his body. Adine, I had found out, was a wereverine, the shortened name for a were wolverine. Wereverines are exceedingly rare, and according to both Lydia and Tanya, very tough.

Stewart hardly knew where to begin, he was so excited to meet the individuals in the room, but he chose to start with Tanya, a not unwise choice.

“Miss Demidova, I am so thrilled to meet you! I have to confess to being something of an admirer of yours for some years now,” he said, taking her hand in a way that was somehow old fashioned looking. She started to frown at his words, but he was already shaking hands with Brett and Kelly.

“Mr. and Mrs. Mallek, congratulations on such a successful launch of a new Pack. I’ve never heard of a smoother beginning,” he said, then turned to Gramps while confusion flowed over the faces of the two Alphas.

“Mr. Gordon, I know something of your own career and history, and I am honored to meet you. Your service to this country has been exemplary and it helps me understand, in part, how Christian turned out to be the exceptional person he is today!” he said.

It was Gramps turn to frown, as Stewart delivered this last admiring and very cryptic greeting. His words made me wonder about the truth behind my grandfather’s military service.

The room was silent, shocked speechless by his casual greetings that hinted at intensive personal knowledge. Brett was sniffing the air, trying to place a mystifying scent; Tanya had frozen, her emotions locked down, and Gramps was frowning dangerously at the Director.

I decided to throw in before it got ugly.

“Director Stewart heads a group of very special individuals, that he has never really explained, but I can tell you that his personal assistant is a wereverine, so I’m thinking his group is kinda like the X-men or maybe the Avengers or something,” I said.

Everyone looked at me like I was crazy, although Brett’s eyes had a sudden gleam of recognition for the scent he had picked up on the Director. Gina just snorted in amusement and Stewart was giving me a look of slight admiration.

“I don’t know as I’d characterize it quite in those terms Chris, but the comparison has a small amount of validity…very small,” he said. “But I have allowed my excitement to overwhelm my good sense and I apologize if my remarks touched on sensitive issues.”

Somehow I had trouble believing the Nathan Stewart had ever done anything unintentional in his life.

“Where is the stoic Ms. Benally, Director?” I asked.

“She has posted herself downstairs on guard duty. She felt her presence might lend an…inflammatory essence to the situation.”

“What exactly does your group of comic book heroes do, Mr. Stewart?” Brett asked.

“Ironically enough, our mission is similar, at least in theory, to the one that the agents in rebus like to talk about,” he answered with a sardonic smile. “That is, we protect this country and its allies from threats that fall outside the purview of the more conventional intelligence departments.”

“Supernatural threats?” Kelly asked.

“Well, threats that utilize supernatural elements, such as hostile foreign governments or terrorist units that have supernatural help. But we also bring an unconventional capability to the table, and unlike the shadowy AIR people, we work for the President.”

“What brings you to my hospital room, Director Stewart?” Gramps asked, with a sharp gleam in his eye.

“I could tell you in all honesty that I’m here because Mrs. Velasquez felt Chris and his lovely..wife?...” he trailed off looking between Tanya and I with eyebrows raised in question.

“Close enough,” Tanya said.

“Anyway…on the chance that Chris and his wife, Tatiana would be here. I’m utterly fascinated with the two of you!” he said smiling ear-to-ear. “But the harsh reality is that I’m also tracking down anything I can find on the agents in rebus group. Their highly visible emergence from the shadows troubles me greatly.”

“How long have you been aware of them?” I asked.

He considered his answer, gazing thoughtfully back at me for a moment before reaching some internal decision.

“Decades,” was his answer.

“How long has your group been in existence, Director?” Tanya asked.

Again he met her sharp blue-laser gaze for a moment, his eyes twinkling, before answering.

“Decades,” was all he said.

“That file you gave me…the one labeled ‘Brutal Asset’, was found while you were hunting them?” I asked.

He nodded. “They share my interest in…unconventional assets…what you might call supernatural, although I believe that most of what we call the supernatural is a natural part of our existence, just not understood by our science at this time.”

“So what’s the deal with the A.I.R. folks?” I asked.

“From what I have learned, it seems they were founded under sound principles, but have been warped over the years by a misguided leadership,” he said, his right hand plucking at his mustache as he spoke. “A.I.R. does, in fact, protect this country. But its methods are beyond Machiavellian and its leader runs roughshod over the checks and balances of the Constitution in the belief that he and he alone knows what is best.”

“Who is he?” Tanya asked.

“That, my dear, is the billion dollar question. I’ve been hunting him for a long time and I have some ideas, but as of now…he’s still a mystery,” Stewart said.

A sharp electronic bleep sounded from his suit pocket. He was momentarily startled, then looked chagrined as he reached into his inside breast pocket and pulled out an extremely slim radio. The earpiece dangled from the unit and after a moment of confusion he simply pulled its jack out and held the radio up to his ear.

“Stewart here,” he said into the unit.

“Director, there is a were in wolf form down here following a scent. He’s got a broken chain around his neck and he won’t Change. He’s trying to get upstairs.”

The voice I recognized as Adine Benally.

“Sir, she shouldn’t try to stop him. He’s with us and believe me when I tell you she doesn’t want him Changing,” I said.

“Oh! The bear-wolf?” he asked, his gleam of excitement back.

I wasn’t overly surprised that he knew about Awasos.

“Adine, please bring him up,” he said into the radio.

“As you wish Director,” was the tinny response.

“I wondered where he was,” Gramps said.

“We couldn’t smuggle him over the border, but I thought he would handle it on his own. The Coven was supposed to release him once we were on the bus and gone. Looks like he got impatient,” I said.

“What did he do? Swim the St. Lawrence river?” Kelly asked.

“Hard to know, but he’s about as fond of swimming as you are, which is to say, not so much. He might have snuck on board a truck or boat,” I said.

“He does many things that we haven’t been able to figure out,” Tanya added.

She didn’t embellish, even though the Malleks and Stewart looked intrigued.

I thought about explaining his penchant for opening doors and getting out of locked rooms, but before I could, the sound of big paws came thundering down the hall, accompanied by a rattling chain sound.

A moment later the big black and tan form of Awasos came to a halt in the doorway. A length of chain dangled from his neck and his fur was a bit matted in places, but he looked good otherwise.

He scanned the room for a moment, then bee lined for Gramps, giving the old man a sniff and face lick. Next he padded over to Tanya and snuffled her to make sure she was okay, then finally he swiveled around and sat, staring at me in a most accusing manner.

“Yes, I get it. You’re pissed I left you behind. But you would have stuck out like a sore thumb on a bus load of oldsters. Besides, I knew you’d get here on your own,” I said.

He looked away with obvious disdain, making his opinion of me very clear.

Everyone in the room, except Stewart, knew him, so they weren’t surprised, but the Director was obviously delighted by the exchange.

“My god, but he’s a smart one , isn’t he?” he exclaimed.

Awasos looked curiously at the old gentlemen, then glanced at the doorway just as the Director’s assistant appeared, looking slightly ruffled.

“He’s smarter than most humans,” I said, moving up beside the big wolf to pull off his chain.

Awasos’s attention was locked on Adine, so he didn’t move away as I cut off his chain with a mono-edged finger, but I knew I had a ways to go before I was back on his good side.

Stewart introduced his assistant around the room, watching the interchange of personalities with interest.

Brett and Kelly stood stiffly, hackles almost visibly raised, eyes focused on the wereverine who looked like a somewhat pretty, very fit, well-muscled young woman of Native American descent. Today, she was dressed in a navy business suit, her hair up in a bun of some sort. I suddenly wondered if it was really long and just how often she let it down.

Tanya flicked a glance my way, her expression slightly exasperated with my random thought, the gist of which she felt through our link. Then her brilliant blue eyes slid back to watch Adine.

Adine Benally wasn’t a hand shaker. Too aloof, too reserved. Instead she gave each individual a sharp nod, ignoring the Malleks’ hostile response, glancing briefly my way, but reserving most of her attention for Tanya and Awasos. She watched the wolf-bear, but her stance oriented her body toward Tanya, unconsciously facing what she deemed her greatest threat.

Gramps snorted then looked my way. “Reminds me of Korea,” was all he said.

Stewart looked surprised at the comment then smiled and nodded.

“Very much like soldiers meeting each other for the first time,” he said.

“Well it’s nice that we’re all meeting and all, but what’s next?” Brett asked.

“If Gramps is able to be released, then the next step is getting him home and making sure there aren’t any of those AIR bastards lurking around,” I said.

“The Pack is watching the farm. Nobody and nothing is getting near it without us knowing,” Brett replied, eyes still on Adine.

“What is his prognosis, Gina?” I asked, knowing she would have thoroughly checked his charts.

“He seems to be fine,” she replied, glancing at his monitors. “In fact, his numbers look really good, like amazingly good,” she said, eyes narrowed as she scanned the electronic proof of his improved condition.

“Well then, let’s get him discharged and home,” Tanya said, suddenly, not meeting Gina’s glance.

“Director Stewart, I would very much like to talk to you about the agents in rebus after I get my grandfather home and comfortable,” I said to the white haired gent.

“I think that can be arraigned. Actually, if it is alright, I will accompany you to the farm and we can talk as time permits,” he replied.

Gramps nodded assent, Kelly and Brett looked slightly uncomfortable, Gina watched quietly and Tanya gave me a small smile. Adine’s face reflected nothing but her stiff body language was a mirror of the Malleks.

Chapter 21

Leaving the hospital took longer than it had any right too, but there was nothing suspicious about the delay. Simply the standard bureaucratic world of modern medicine. Don’t sue us for this, take that at your own risk, guarantee the bills with your soul, and thank you very much…next.

Brett and Kelly left ahead of us, promising to make sure things were ready. Gramps was uncharacteristically quiet, not even protesting our fussing. Now in his defense, only an idiot would protest to having Tanya coddling him, but it was more than that. He was worrying away at some thought, tearing it to pieces in his standard manner. I kept an eye on him, not liking his silence overly much.

We drove Gramps home in the Coven car, Stewart following with his assistant and several others in a big black SUV.

The farm was quiet when we got there, just the dogs, Sherm and Shep, greeting us, although I sensed eyes watching us from the wood line at the field’s edge. The Pack had adopted Gramps and his workers, and patrolled the land against trespassers, two-footed or four, natural or supernatural. The dogs had learned to tolerate the werewolves that lived next door, but they actively liked Awasos, probably because they had known him since he was a pup..er..cub..whatever.

Len was out, overseeing the other hands as they took care of the little dairy farm, but I radioed him on the one of the Motorola walkie-talkies that everyone carried about the place. Gramps was really fine, and now that he was home, his normal spark reappeared and he stopped letting us take care of him, disappearing upstairs to take a shower and shave.

I made coffee then started cooking. I was starving, the farm crew would be in for an early lunch soon and I knew that Adine, as a were, would be hungry as well. The farmhouse was old, but the kitchen appliances were modern commercial grade. The big fridge yielded the better part of a cooked ham, a big block of New York sharp cheddar from the Amish farm down the road, and several loaves of sourdough bread. So I whipped up some pan fried Panini sandwiches(eating three myself as I made them), broke out bags of chips, cracked open a big jar of dill pickles, and restocked the fruit bowl that lives in the center of the kitchen table’s giant lazy-susan. Our farm house used to have a dining room adjacent to the kitchen, but Gramps ripped out the wall and made one big room of the two. A huge old rough-hewn harvest table filled half the room, with two big benches on either long side. We could seat eight to ten without bumping elbows and could squeeze in another three or four if we got close.

Gramps came downstairs almost exactly as Len and the other three hands came in, followed by Gina, Stewart, and Adine. Gina had taken the Director and Adine for a tour of the little farm. Awasos appeared, apparently ready to exchange forgiveness for some fatty chunks of ham. In a blatant attempt at bribing my way back into his good graces, I dug out one of the beef thigh bones that Gramps stored in the basement chest freezer for him. He immediately took it outside to grind into bone chips, his efforts watched closely by Shep and Sherm.

Looking out the window I could see two of Stewart’s people standing watch around the SUV, so I loaded up some plates, grabbed sodas and headed out.

The two, a man and a woman, were facing the fields and forest that bordered the Pack’s property, their heads swiveling to watch something that wasn’t visible to my enhanced eyes. I approached silently, curious, but the tall, gawky looking male turned before I had taken two steps.

He was human and looked like I had always imagined Ichabod Crane, bony, tall and awkward. His brown eyes were sharp though and he had sensed me when a vamp or were would have been hard pressed to hear me. His long arms showed a surprising amount of muscle tone.

The female had light brown hair, almost blonde, and wore glasses over pale blue eyes. She looked a little heavier than her average height would suggest she should, but carried herself like she was an ex-athlete. Reminded me of several stocky softball players I knew in college.

“Hi, I’m Chris. I thought you might be hungry so I brought you some lunch,” I said by way of introduction. They both were looking at me curiously and maybe a bit warily. Then their attention shifted to the food and their expressions showed interest. The woman looked at the guy who gave me a narrow-eyed look, then nodded back at her. Apparently that was the okay, because they both took the food with softly murmured thank yous. The woman was Barb, the guy Eric.

The wind shifted slightly and I caught the scent of werewolf, one that I recognized. Eric’s head came up and he watched the tree line some three hundred yards distant.

Eric noticed me watching his reaction. He flushed just ever so slightly and I had a sudden image of a teenage Eric in high school – shy and awkward. More awkward.

“There is something large in the woods watching us. It’s dangerous,” he stated, defensively.

“Yes, it’s very dangerous..it’s a werewolf,” I replied, not adding that the werewolf’s name was David.

“You know it?” Barb asked, suspicious. Her accent spoke of the deep south.

“Him…I know him. He’s watching you, not me,” I said, than went on before the sudden frowns on their faces erupted into speech. “You’re government, and supernaturals don’t like government, like moonshiners don’t like the law.”

Surprise flashed across her face as my statement told her I knew roughly where she had grown up.

“Does your grandfather and the hired help have any idea?” Eric asked.

“Of course. We own the land they live on. I was the one to offer the lease to them,” I said.

“But you don’t have to live here,” Barb said.

“You work with Adine,” I said, simply.

“But this is the work I’ve chosen and I’m a bit different. I’m not helpless against them,”

“Well, it took some adjustment, but our help is very loyal and completely lacking in curiosity. All of them have worked here for years and have been exposed to some pretty weird stuff. In the last year or so they’ve learned that being friends with a pack of super predators is pretty handy. None of our cows ever get lost, no natural predator will come near this land, and neither will any thief. Last year a tractor rolled on one of the guys and the werewolf that’s watching us lifted it off of him,” I answered, wondering what gift she had that made her not helpless.

“So you’re what? Psychic or something?” I asked the two of them.

They froze for a second or two, then Barb answered. “Something,” she agreed with a nod.

I left them to their lunch.

***

Len, Marty, Kevin and Tom almost forgot to eat their lunches; they were too distracted by the visitors, or at least the female visitors. Marty, Tom and Kevin were married, but you wouldn’t have known it as they bounced up and down, waiting on Adine and Gina. Tanya wasn’t eating, of course, but standing next to me while I started the ham bone boiling for split pea soup. Len sat next to Gramps, mainly quiet, shaking his head as his guys made fools of themselves and watching Stewart from the corner of his eyes.

The Director had shaken all their hands, but seemed to recognize Len, which didn’t surprise me. I had come to the conclusion in my late teens that Gramps and Len’s military service hadn’t been your standard, run-of-the-mill careers. Enough clues (like Len’s knife fighting skills and Gramps knowledge of modern surveillance) spoke of special ops or military intelligence type backgrounds. The Director’s comments earlier to Gramps and his apparent recognition of Len’s face suggested that their service files had found their way across his desk.

With lunch finally finished and the hands unable to find any other excuses to attempt flirting with the polite Gina or the expressionless Ms. Benally, Len ushered them out the door to continue the day’s work. He gave us a slightly embarrassed nod, then shut the door firmly.

Tanya helped me pick up the remains of the meal, while we both waited for Stewart to broach whatever topic was bubbling just under his curious, smiling expression. For her part, my vampire had stayed mainly quiet during the lunch. The hired hands had met her before and were so intimidated by either her looks or dangerous aura as to be almost crippled in her presence. They were carefully polite to her, but had focused their attentions on Gina and Adine.

“I’ve spent the bulk of a very long career working with the extraordinary, the paranormal and the fringe of modern science,” Stewart said, changing the tone of the polite lunch conversation.

The door opened behind us; Eric and Barb came through holding their empty plates, which I took from them. Putting the plates in the sink I turned to see the two take up position behind Stewart. Benally was watching me carefully, almost on the edge of her seat. Gina was just beginning to frown.

“But in all that time I’ve never seen, heard of or come across a situation like this!” the Director continued, waving his hand at me and Tanya and including the entire farm. “A natural born exorcist, raised by an ex-Marine Raider Captain with ties to the CIA, who meets the only vampire ever born to the species and becomes an entirely new strain of supernatural. And his home borders a Pack of young werewolves, his pet is another new species, in this case, of were with no human genes. The final kick in the pants is that this exorcist and his vampire mate are godparents to the daughter of the President’s Advisor on paranormal species. Extraordinary! How is your goddaughter? I hope she’s safer than your grandfather.”

His tone had changed as he spoke, becoming colder and less friendly and the final part, the bit about Toni, was delivered in a threatening tone.

Grim slid into control as the threat to Toni registered. My link to Tanya went full bandwidth, full combat mode. Benally was quivering in her chair, the woman, Barb, was watching me with one hand raised like she was going tell me to halt, Eric was holding his forehead in one hand looking worried. Director Stewart was watching me, and to a degree, Tanya, his face rapt with anticipation.

“I’m blocked, Sir. Not sure how, it was sudden,” Eric said, sweat beading on his face. Stewart just nodded once, not turning from us. My normal self could have told him that the reason the mind reader kid wasn’t up to speed was the bubble of aura that Grim had plunked mentally over his head, but my normal self wasn’t running the show at that moment.

“Stupid!” Gina hissed. “Idiotic, half-assed, unprofessional piece of SHIT!” she yelled.

Stewart spared her a glance, looking slightly surprised. Gina jumped up and leaned over the table on both hands, getting right in Stewart’s space. He had no choice but to turn his attention to her, although he was obviously loath to stop watching us although neither Tanya or I had moved a muscle.

“Shouldn’t you refrain from sudden moves and all, my dear?” he asked quietly.

“I told you…neither of us could possibly make a move that they would consider sudden. But you just had to do it – didn’t you? Just had to provoke to see what would happen. I told you that a threat to Toni was a trigger point, so that we could prevent just this….not so you could conduct some stupid experiment! Is this how you do everything? Do you people mix explosives in the bathtub? Do you stare down the barrel of a cocked and loaded gun with your finger on the trigger to see what the bullet looks like?”

Gina was ripping mad, something I hadn’t really ever seen before and part of me was fascinated. That part was still just an observer, as Grim was not done evaluating the threat.

My grandfather suddenly spoke. “You’re right,” he said, directing his comment at Stewart.

Gina looked at him incredulously.

“When you said you’ve never seen anything like this before, you were right. More than you can possibly know,” Gramps continued. “But if you think the precautions you’ve taken here – “ he waved his hands at Adine, Eric and Barb, “ – are remotely enough than I’ve misjudged your intelligence. You’ve got a telepath, a were and, what a witch or psychokinetic? Hah.” He slightly overemphasized the psycho part.

Director Stewart frowned, looking affronted. “I think, Sir, that you’ve misjudged the quality of the people I have with me. Eric is one of the most powerful telepaths we’ve ever come across. Barb is a world class tele-kinetic, and Adine, well she’s in a class by herself.”

My Grim side was tired of waiting. My body shifted slightly and that was all that was needed.

Barb, who had been nervous before, even as she appeared to be gathering some power or energy, reacted to my movement. She raised her hand, shoved it in my direction and released the dark cloud I could see about her head. It moved at the speed of thought, at least her thought. It was much slower than Grim’s. My combat persona just absorbed it into my aura, soaking it up like a Bounty paper towel and a puddle of water. Then he pushed back.

Barb was picked up and thrown back against the brick wall near the wood stove, held frozen in place, her feet suspended two feet off the ground.

Adine came off her chair, her face starting to change shape. She managed to get her butt two inches off the chair before she came to a sudden and complete halt. My vampire was behind her, her arms wrapped in a rear choke hold around the wereverine’s neck. The speed of her movement across the room sent papers and napkins flying off the table and a sharp crack announced the displacement of air.

Choking a were is a tricky business. The problem is that they have the option of Changing forms. When a 120 pound woman morphs into a 230 pound wolverine the drastic change in neck size will break the hold of almost anyone. Amost. Not Tanya’s though.

Benally’s clothes burst at the seams and she kicked and thrashed, but Tanya was Posted to the floor and the very foundation of the house itself. Her arms, stronger than steel, tightened, and despite clawing the shit out of our table, Adine passed out in less than twenty seconds. Eric, clearly terrified out of his mind, reached for a gun on his hip. A low growl three feet to his right caused him to freeze. Turning his head slowly to the right, he found 1000 pounds of pissed off grizzly standing in the now open kitchen door. Awasos wasn’t happy about government people with guns at this point in time, a fact that Eric, bless his soul, picked up on real quick.

Stewart was visibly distressed at the sight of his assistant, limp in the arms of my vampire. Adine’s partial Change had stopped and her features flowed slowly back to human.

“You killed her?” the Director asked, his voice shaking.

“No Director Stewart, not yet,” Tanya answered, her gaze turning back to me.

Stewart’s head swiveled to follow her look, but he couldn’t meet Grim’s expression. Even Gramps wasn’t looking at me, but Gina was, even as she dialed her cell phone.

“Roy? Where’s Toni?” she asked into the phone. Her husband’s response was crystal clear to me even fifteen feet away.

“She’s right here…watching TV. Why?”

“Because someone gave me a bad scare and implied she was in danger,” she answered, glaring at Stewart as she spoke.

“Nope, everything’s fine here. They better hope Chris and Tanya don’t hear them suggest that,” he said, wryly.

“Too late,” she replied.

“Oh…Oh! Good luck with that,”

“Yeah gotta go. Love you! Tell Toni I love her.”

“She wants to say hi.”

I could hear the phone fumble then a small voice spoke.

“Hi Mommy, I ‘m watching Animal Planet,” my god daughter said. Something inside me relaxed a bit.

“Hi baby. Is it something good?” Gina asked.

“Wilderbeasts,” she said. Her father spoke up. “Wildebeests, Toni, not Wilder- beasts,”

“Mommy, is Mr. Chris there?”

“Ah, he is baby, but he’s busy,” Gina said, looking my way.

Grim retreated, Barb fell off the wall, Tanya let go of Adine, and Awasos stopped growling.

I reached my hand out for the phone. Gina handed it to me after a quick glance around the room. Stewart was open mouthed in disbelief.

“Hi Toni, what are those wilder beasts doing?” I asked.

She giggled. “Mostly running around, but a few are getting eaten by crocodiles and lions and hyenas.”

“Can you do me a favor? Would you grab your necklace…your bear necklace and squeeze it real hard?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said.

“Now think of me or Tanya or Awasos,” I directed, keeping my voice too low for Stewart to hear.

She must have done it because I immediately had a clear image of her sitting in her house in the family room, on the floor in front of the television, her white rat, Sebastian, climbing on her shoulder.

Tanya nodded at me and Awasos woofed, shuffling from foot to foot which he does when he’s about to lick Toni’s tiny face.

Chapter 22

I said goodbye and handed the phone back to her mother. Gina headed into the other room, still talking with her daughter, while I looked over at Stewart and his crew.

“Okay, Mr. Stewart,” I began, intentionally omitting his title. “What exactly did you think to accomplish by implying a threat to my goddaughter?”

Adine came awake suddenly, jerking upright, but calming slightly at the touch of Stewart’s hand on her arm. A pale, sweaty Eric was helping his female team member to her feet.

Adine looked around, then her expression set and her shoulders hunched. Stewart was watching her carefully and when her head fell forward in obvious self-reproach he immediately spoke.

“Adine, dear, I have failed you,” he said, patting her hand then covering it with his own. She looked up at him, startled at his words.

“I have failed you and Eric and Barb,” he continued. “I should never have put you in this position. If I had properly listened to Mrs. Velasquez, none of this would have happened.”

Adine started to speak, but he held up his free hand, gesturing for silence. “You see my dear, I’ve forgotten too much over these many years. I’ve forgotten that there are mysteries beyond what you and I have experienced together. The evidence was obvious, in fact, General Creek even showed me video, but somehow I’ve become arrogant – overconfident in my own knowledge and judgment.”

Gina came back in from the other room and leaned up against the door frame to listen.

Stewart nodded at her, then turned back to me and Tanya, who was standing next to me, but keeping a close eye on Adine. The Director’s expression was a unique mixture of sadness and chagrin.

“When I was twenty-four. Chris, I was a very new, very wet-behind the ears recruit for a little known intelligence group attached to the U.S. Army. They had recruited me straight out of Harvard. You see, I was lucky enough to graduate with two degrees. One in political science and the other in psychology. The folks who hired me had read two papers I had written in my senior year. The first paper detailed my own analysis of Europe’s politics at that time and my conclusions apparently matched those of my employers. They were impressed. My other paper was about self-suggestive psychology in relation to supposed paranormal activity,” Stewart said, with a self-deprecating smile. “My theory on that was that people deluded themselves into believing they were seeing ghosts, meeting angels or performing magic. I was pretty full of myself with that piece of work, but what I didn’t realize was that while my bosses agreed with my political paper, they didn’t believe my psychology paper. But my skepticism made me a perfect investigator for supernatural phenomenon that they hoped was real.” The Director paused, looking at Adine as he remembered the story. Barb and Eric looked fascinated, making me think was a story they hadn’t heard before.

“So my new bosses sent me north to Alaska to investigate a story from the interior. A trapper had come out of the bush with a crazy tale of a man-beast deep in the wilderness. Off I went with a squad of infantry for protection. In Anchorage I met my native guide, a beautiful young woman of Athabaskan descent,” he said looking at Adine and squeezing her hand. Her look back was the first unguarded expression I’d ever seen on her face. Despite the apparent difference in years, they were obviously an item.

Which begged a question.

“Chris….I don’t think you need to raise your hand, just ask,” Stewart said with a small smile.

Slightly embarrassed, I lowered my hand. “Sorry, force of habit. I just wanted to ask what year this all took place?”

He smiled again, the sharp gleam returning a bit to his eye. “1938,” he answered.

I did some quick math. Gramps was faster. “You were born in 1914,” my grandfather stated.

“Yes, I am ninety-eight this year,” Stewart said.

“So the LV virus in your leg has slowed your aging,” I said, not really surprised although he looked no older than late sixties.

Now he was visibly surprised. “You know I have Lycanthropic Virus in my leg?”

“Yeah, I see it in your aura. It matches Adine’s, so I’m thinking it’s the same strain, and you were both infected at the same time,” I answered.

“You continue to astound me, young Mr. Gordon, although you have completely ruined the telling of my story,” he said, slightly admonishing.

“Sorry, Director, please go on,” I said.

“So, where was I? Oh yeah, headed deep into the interior wilderness with eight soldiers, one staff sergeant, and Adine. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say, that it was difficult for the hardened troops, and therefore, it almost killed me. Adine handled it the best, but then we were headed to her home, you see. Her father was shaman for the tribe of Athabascan Indians, or Na Dene, as they call themselves, whose village was our destination. It was summer, so the mosquitoes and black flies were legion, the terrain broken and rugged beyond anything I had ever encountered. To this day, the best way in to her village is by bush plane,” he said, pausing to take a drink of his milk.

It was fresh from our farm and therefore tasted completely different from store bought milk. He seemed to relish it. Gramps refilled his glass from the pitcher on the table and Stewart nodded his thanks before continuing.

“If I were telling this story to a different audience I would explain the difficulties in hunting a creature with the senses of a wolverine and the intelligence of a man. But you people are world class experts in hunting and destroying weres, something I will never forget again,” he said. Then he noticed the rapt expressions on Eric and Barb’s faces. “This story is not to be repeated,” he admonished them with a finger wave.

“I will say that I had questioned my beautiful guide at great length regarding the stories of this particular beast. I was shocked to find that she had an intellect that was every bit my equal. Despite my skepticism at the validity of this story, I was captivated by her attention to detail, flavored with the rich culture of her people. She was fresh from the University of Seattle, where she had earned a degree in government studies, a feat uncommon for most women in that day, let alone one who was a Native American from a poor fishing village in Alaska.”

He took another sip of milk, then went on.

“I was already well on my way to being smitten, by the time we arrived at her village. The stories had described a man who could turn into a beast during the full moon and slaughter any human who was unlucky enough to encounter him. Classic werewolf story. My guide was adamant though that it wasn’t a wolf, but Naltsiis, the Dene term for wolverine.

We met her father, the shaman for her village and several others. He warned us that the creature would consider the village his personal territory and would take our presence as a hostile invasion. I thanked him, then promptly ignored his words as I had absolute faith in my personal theories, backed by the weapons of my soldiers. Plus it was a good four days till the next full moon, so we had plenty of time…or so I thought. Sergeant Price set up camp efficiently and posted a rotating guard. Turns out it’s not hard to find wereverines at all. All you need do is trespass on their territory with armed men and you’ll bring them right in. I also learned that weres are not bound by the full moon.

The wereverine attacked the first night, slaughtered the guards and half the men before we were aware he was among us. It wasn’t even late or very dark, this being Alaska in the summer, when the days are exceedingly long. Adine and I were at my tent, discussing the absence of this kind of creature from their legends. Our first clue that something was wrong was when Private Scott’s head landed on my map table, followed two shotgun blasts.

An astounding number of events came together to allow the two of us to survive. The first was Sergeant Price. He was a veteran of World War I and a firm believer in modern firepower. Subsequently, we were well armed with two Browning Automatic Rifles, three Thompson submachine guns, a bunch of Springfield rifles and several pump shotguns. Price had posted two guards on four hour shifts. The beast killed both guards and three soldiers in one of the tents before anyone got off a shot. Corporal Izzo was coming back from the latrine, saw the monster tear apart poor Scott and shot it twice with the shotgun that Sergeant Price insisted that everyone take with them to the jakes. It was his standing order in bear country.

Those two blasts of double ought buckshot saved us. Didn’t save Izzo, who was disemboweled almost instantly. But the buckshot wounded the were and slowed it enough for Price and Private Nelson to open up with Thompsons. Even wounded it was still fast enough to avoid most of the rounds, run through my tent, wound Adine and I, and kill one more soldier. I don’t recall his name,” he said, brow furrowed as he tried to remember.

“O’Connor…Private O’Connor was his name, Nathan,” Adine said in a soft voice, not looking up from the table.

“Yes, my dear, you are correct. It was O’Connor who died last. Sergeant Price grabbed his BAR, which was his pride and joy. A custom job, shortened and lightened. He killed the wereverine, emptied a full magazine into its skull and chest,” he said.

“That would do it,” my grandfather agreed.

“Yes, Mr. Gordon, a most impressive weapon the BAR,” Stewart said. “One day on site and the expedition was a shambles. Seven dead soldiers and two wounded. My leg had taken a bite,” he said, patting his left calf. “But Adine was really badly wounded, with bites and claw wounds everywhere. The gunfire was heard in the village and Adine’s father arrived with some of the village men. They helped Price and Nelson bury the dead and burn the wereverine. I had, of course taken tissue samples, not realizing that Adine and I were carrying the virus in our bodies. Adine’s father knew though, what with him being a shaman and all. He helped treat our wounds, applying certain herbs that in my case stopped the virus from spreading and changing me. He couldn’t do anything to slow the LV in his daughter though.”

Stewart paused and gazed into Adine’s eyes fondly.

“A truly remarkable man Mr. Benally was. By all rights he should have murdered us. The chances of Adine retaining her sanity were exceedingly slim, you see. Wereverines are exceptionally rare, almost all of them are born to the species. Bitten wereverines are left on their own and almost without exception go crazy at their first change. Wolverines are not pack animals like wolves, they don’t hang around to help the newly Changed. But Adine’s father used his skills to link us, so that I could help Adine through her first Change. It worked and here we are.”

He looked around at the silent audience, all of us fascinated by his story. Sipping his milk, he turned back to me.

“I’ve haven’t told that story in thirty or forty years. But after my monumental error in judgment, I can at least give you some idea of what we’re about. Since that trip, Adine and I have traveled the world seeking out knowledge and individuals of the supernatural world. We have used that knowledge to help every President since that day. The unique and truly gifted group of people we’ve been able to recruit have done as much for this country as Seal Team Six, but with even less fanfare.”

“So you’re here to recruit us?” I asked.

“Oh, Chris, I would dearly love to recruit you and your lovely bride, but I realize you have conflicts, especially given her apparent position in the society of vampires as I understand it,” he said. “It’s those very conflicts that bring me here.”

“Conflicts with what?” I asked.

“Ms. Demidova is, from what we understand, highly ranked in the hierarchy of the Coven. Which is odd, seeing as she has a birth certificate proving she is, actually only twenty-five. But perhaps it has to do with her being born into the species and all? But I digress.

You have what has been described as an ‘incredibly intense’ relationship with a high ranking member of what we understand is a worldwide society of vampires. A nation as it were. And your loyalty to the nation of your birth is very much in question,” he said.

“Excuse me? When have I shown myself to be disloyal to the United States. I pretty much removed a threat to the country by myself,” I said.

“Yes, you eradicated the Loki Spawn problem, a fact that I should have thought more about earlier today,” he said, looking thoughtful, then shaking his head ruefully. “What I’m referring to is your video conference with the President, the one where you threatened the nation and his life.”

“That’s odd Director, I have a pretty good memory of the event you’re talking about and I don’t recall either you being there or me threatening the President. I do recall the President threatening me with two Reaper drones and an AC-130 gunship, plus about thirty specialforces, Delta types.”

“I’ve seen video of the situation room under the White House. That Elder god you unleashed on the President seemed pretty threatening to me,” he said starkly.

“Elder god, as in independent and under his own control. I had no responsibility for his actions, which were a response to threats against myself,” I said, now beginning to get really angry.

He started to respond, but I held up my hand. “Let’s layout my side of the equation for just a second. I’ve spent my entire life from the time I was twelve exorcising demons that no one else could. You might consider that a service to the country. Then a couple of years ago I meet a girl, who changed my life. From that point on, my country started hounding me, threatening everyone and anyone in my life, right up to the point of using military assets against me inside the borders of my own country, of which I remind you I am a natural born citizen. I got past that and then removed a terrorist threat that my government was ill equipped to deal with. If a friend of mine, who happened to be a powerful entity intervened on my behalf without consulting me, that’s no reflection on my loyalty which is fast becoming more strained by the minute.”

I was angry enough by this point that the God Tear necklace flared hot causing me to touch it. Stewart’s sharp eyes noticed the movement, absorbing that motion along with every other detail of our meeting.

“I notice that you used the past tense when referring to the being I believe you call Okwari,” he said. “I told the President that every understanding I’ve garnered over seventy years of occult and supernatural investigation leads me to believe that Elder gods are not allowed to roam our world at will. I told him that your Okwari had most likely been forced to leave our realm by powers higher than himself,” he said, watching closely.

Awasos chose that moment to cross the room, weaving his giant grizzly bulk through the chairs and people to arrive and slump down at my feet like a portable, furry loveseat.

I kept my face expression blank, my arms still crossed over my chest.

“Mr. Stewart, excuse me, Director Stewart,” Tanya said suddenly. “Christian’s relationship to the Darkkin Coven is a result of his becoming my Chosen. However, you and your President should be aware that his involvement and importance to our vampire nation is considered a matter of what could be termed our national security. His value in the eyes of our leaders is almost impossible to measure. However, our leaders recognize his ties and loyalties to the country of his natural birth, which is also the country of my birth. I too am a citizen of this nation,” she said waving her hands around, her Russian accent thick. “Don’t be fooled by my accent. I spent many years in Russia, my mother’s homeland, but I am an American at heart and Darkkin to my marrow. Much as your assistant is both an American and Athabascan. Dual citizenship is not a rare occurrence. So I think what you are really discussing is humans versus vampires, no?”

She paused to study his reaction. I’m not sure what she saw, but the tightening around his eyes led me to believe she had struck a mark.

“You’re a game player, Director. That’s obvious from your actions. Deliberately triggering Christian with an implied threat to Toni. A dangerous gamble; in fact, I don’t think you know how dangerous it was. Then this whole them versus us thing. Personally, I favor chess, but I think you’re more of a poker man, always trying to get a read on your opponent. Good skill to have, but it only works if you can see all the players. I promise you, Director, you haven’t even met all the players in this game. Think very, very carefully before you go all in.”

Stewart looked at for a moment, his mustache twitching slightly, then he broke into a grin.

“You are very astute, Ms. Demidova. I do, in fact, enjoy the game of poker and I’m guilty of playing on Chris’s hot buttons, as it were. But the question of human versus vampire or were or any supernatural is very real. In certain very high, very powerful circles, it is the single most important concern. A concern that came fully to light because of Chris’s involvement. I can tell you that the Loki Spawn operation in Mexico and the expanded knowledge of were-kind has kicked up a hornet’s nest. You simply can’t reveal a threat of that nature to the military and not expect them to seek defenses. The President has been under enormous pressure to reveal his ‘asset’ in that operation. An ‘asset’ that is viewed with fear and distrust.”

“We are well aware of the flurry of intelligence activity that was the result of expanded knowledge of supernaturals. We know all about Taskforce 17 and its charter to learn everything about our world,” Tanya said, visibly surprising Stewart.

I was surprised too, I didn’t know anything about any special Taskforce. My grandfather saved me from having to ask.

“Taskforce 17?” he asked.

“The multi-agency intelligence group set up by the President two years ago after Chris’s confrontation with him. It’s separate from the Department of Anomalous Activity; being less action oriented and more intelligence gathering. Gina, you were deliberately left out of it as you are deemed to be of compromised loyalty,” Tanya said.

The Director was caught flatfooted by my vampiress’s knowledge, and to a lesser degree, so was I. She never told me any of this, but then I never asked. Tanya was privy to a great deal of Coven secrets and I never asked her questions about them, not wanting to put her in a conflict and frankly not wanting to expose myself to all their dark secrets.

“You’re surprised that we know?” she directed at Stewart. “Director, my mother is older than this country and she’s been here through most of its history, along with a great many other vampires. My people have helped guide it through many of its worst crisis; we do that in every country on the planet.”

“Ah, yes, can’t have the cattle killing themselves off,” he said, still shaken at her admission.

“We live with humans and would die without them, so yeah, we have a stake in the survival of human life on this planet. We’re not that different, generally speaking every vampire was once a human,” she said.

“Generally?” he asked.

“Director, do you believe in God?” Gina asked rather suddenly, and very opportunely.

“What?” he asked, caught completely off guard.

“Simple question. Do you believe in God?” she asked again.

“Well, yeah, I mean, yes. After everything I’ve seen and learned it would be hard to disbelieve,” he said.

“What about you?” Gina asked Benally, surprising the were.

“Yes,” was Adine’s answer after a moment.

“You two?” Gina asked, looking at Eric and Barb.

Both nodded, brows furrowed.

“What about demons, Director? What about the Devil?”

“Demonic activity is fairly well known, has been for many, many years,” he answered, looking uncomfortable with the direction the conversation had taken.

“So will you agree that Evil exists and is opposed by its opposite forces, call them Good, or Light?” she asked.

“Well, I won’t deny that demons are evil, but most evil is done by man himself,” he said.

She smiled. “Exactly. Most evil comes from man, just as most good does as well. Vampires and weres are no different. I think Director, that the question shouldn’t be one of vampires versus humans or where Chris falls in that equation, but rather which side of the line do they fall – good or evil?”

“You are asking if vampires and werewolves are evil or good, let me remind you that they prey on humans,” Stewart said with a surge of self-righteousness.

“Really? Ms. Benally, do you eat people?” my grandfather asked.

Stewart’s face turned stormy. “Of course she doesn’t!” he thundered.

“Interesting. Neither does the Pack that lives next door, or the Pack in New York city. Tanya here preys on just one human, but I doubt you’ll hear him complaining,” he said, with a grin in my direction. “Vampires drink from humans; werewolves are dangerous to humans, no question. But both groups live amongst humans and both police themselves to avoid problems. Vampire society frowns on killing people. They prefer willing donors who generally live long, healthy lives. Vampires who wantonly kill are usually killed themselves, right Tanya?”

“That’s true. Killing is bad for business and makes donors nervous or even scarce. Our Elders forbid wanton killing. Master vampires who allow such acts in their territories don’t stay Masters or vampires for long,” she replied, although I sensed she wasn’t fully comfortable with that statement.

Stewart’s angry expression relaxed a bit into something more thoughtful.

“I think Chris’s record speaks pretty clearly to which side he falls on. Can you say the same for the politicians you work for, who, by the way, also ‘prey’ on people,” Gina said.

“Oh come on, that’s hardly an apples to apples comparison,” Stewart said.

“No? You think a person who has lost their job, livelihood, home or freedom because of laws passed by greedy politicians doesn’t suffer?” Gina asked.

“They’re still alive,” Stewart pointed out. Gina held her hand out, palm down and waggled it.

“An innocent who is torn apart by a hungry vampire suffers enormously. A person who loses a job, their home and family, becomes homeless and hopeless and finally dies of exposure does too. My point is that both actions create suffering, just as both are acts of greed. Chris and Tanya are currently assigned to police the Covens and punish those who break the rules of vampire society, and their punishments are far swifter and more final than anything faced by human criminals, be they serial killers or corrupt politicians,” Gina concluded.

Stewart was quiet for a moment, his mustache waggling as he pondered.

“The President asked my opinion of the threat you pose,” he finally began, looking directly at me. “You killed a bunch of federal agents, albeit ones already listed as dead in the war and working for a black ops unit, and you blew up every loaded weapon at that Customs station. Homeland Security freaked out, the National Security Council freaked and the President was this close to freaking,” he said, holding up his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart.

“What about General Creek?” I asked.

“General Creek was rather vehement that we should isolate you and kill you, preferably with an airstrike, possibly with a small tactical nuke,” Stewart replied.

I was a little shocked. I knew that General Creek didn’t like me; thought I had too much power, but I didn’t know he felt I should be bombed. My Grim side slid into control, expanded my senses in ways I don’t know how to duplicate when I’m myself, and scanned the area around us, including the airspace around and above. Nothing.

Gina says it’s easy to tell when Grim is there, in control. My whole demeanor changes, becomes harder, colder and gives off an aura of danger. She says I appear coiled, like I was ready for instant violence. Stewart and company noticed, all of them becoming alert and tense, but with no obvious threats Grim receded, leaving me back in control and pondering the Director’s words.

“That is….interesting,” Stewart said, still watching me through narrowed eyes.

Gramps snorted then gave me a direct, questioning look.

“Nothing in the air or on the ground for several miles,” I answered.

Stewart was fascinated. “That was your alter ego, correct? The Grim Reaper is it?” he asked.

“Just Grim. Grim Reaper was my call sign during the whole Loki Spawn hunt,” I answered.

“Creek told me about your Mr. Hyde. Now I’ve seen it, twice. It’s unnerving,” he said.

“Grim is not a hidden personality in the sense of true multiple personality disorder, Director. At least, I don’t believe so,” Gina said. “Chris is fully aware of the personality and controls it. It’s more like a persona, a combination of traits and responses that excel at certain functions. Like the business man who has a finely tuned haggling ‘face’ that he brings out during negotiations.”

“But this one’s job is fighting,” Stewart stated, looking at Gina.

“Yes, Grim is a combat persona – an uber combat persona. You mentioned an air strike and Grim took over to scan for threats,” Gina said.

“And if there had been an inbound fighter, a gunship or drone on station, then what? Evasion?” Stewart asked.

“No, Director. Chris and Tanya could leave the area very quickly, but the rest of us couldn’t, so Grim would have dealt with the threat,” Gina said. She was right, but I was a little surprised at how well she understood me, in all my forms.

“Dealt with a fighter?” Stewart asked, incredulous.

“Remember the drones and AC-130 incident?” Gina asked.

His eyebrows went straight to his hairline. “Hmm, you have a point.”

He thought about that for a moment then turned to me.

“And you’re sure there’s nothing up there?” he asked, testing.

“Didn’t say that. There are no current threats, there is a US satellite directly overhead as well as another that I think might be Chinese,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the third one that was most likely a Coven owned unit.

“A Chinese satellite parked overhead?” he asked. At my nod he turned to Adine who was already dialing a number on her cell phone. She started a fast conversation with whoever answered. Stewart distracted me by asking more questions.

“You just guessed at the US bird?” he ventured.

“It’s got a weird sorta metallic balloon thingy around it,” I answered after a brief internal consult with Grim.

Benally closed her phone and turned to the Director, whose eyes had gotten wider at my odd description. “Sir, he’s correct about the Chinese sat. They think it’s Yaogan 3,” she said.

“Balloon thingy?” he questioned.

Eric leaned down and whispered in his ear, but his words were clear to Tanya and I.

“Sir, it could be Misty. One of Misty’s design elements is a radar deflecting stealth envelope that could be called a balloon…thingy.”

Stewart turned back toward me and looked very thoughtful.

“Creek is right…you’re a nightmare!” he said, his expression indecisive. After a moment he turned to look at Tanya.

“What about you, my dear? Do you play with air and space craft as well?” he asked.

“With Tanya it’s all about her voice,” Gina said, making me wince inside, hoping she didn’t mention Tanya’s ability with sound. “When she speaks, world economics change. You think Buffett or the Fed Chairman have clout? Who do you think feeds them the answers?”

I heaved a big internal sigh of relief even as Stewart looked more incredulous than at any of my revelations.

“Oh come on! You can’t be serious? A vampire Greenspan?” he asked.

“Let’s review. The vampires average hundreds of years of age. Their government is the oldest on earth. They pool their money and have the most gifted among them invest it. They’ve been in this country before and while it was being built. They have people everywhere, human and vampires both, in every business, every government, everywhere. They pay their people extremely well, protect them viciously and punish betrayers violently. They have all the inside information! Hell, they disseminate most of it themselves. And Tatiana is one of their most gifted business minds with the favor of their ruling Elders,” Gina said.

Stewart was pale now and his mustache trembled as his eyes grew hooded.

“That may be the single scariest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re saying they control the world markets? All of them?” he asked.

Tanya answered. “We mostly let them run themselves, but we monitor everything, feeding tips to the appropriate agencies when participants misbehave. We do utilize inside information, but we keep it subtle. Humans may not believe in vampires and werewolves, but interestingly enough, your most suspicious people are your stock traders and hedge fund managers. They are sensitive to the slightest misalignments in the market place,” she said, shaking her beautiful head in wonder. “But yes, we have our hands in the game everywhere and we protect our investments and assets ruthlessly. And Director Stewart…We are heavily invested in Christian!” she said, nailing him with her cerulean stare.

“Hmmpf,” he said, clearing his throat and jumping a little as he broke her gaze. “Your point is well made.”

Chapter 23

Stewart told us he had enough food for thought and then prepared to leave. I asked one final question.

“What about AIR. Gentis told me that they’ve killed more terrorists than the rest of the government put together. Is that true?”

“It may well be, Chris. They’ve killed a great many high level terrorist leaders…also several hundred innocent bystanders and US personnel,” he said. “They are utterly ruthless and think nothing of sacrificing noncombatants and allies. The President has ordered another smaller taskforce to hunt them down and root them out.”

“He also has a subgroup of Taskforce 17 that concentrates on just Chris and me,” Tanya said.

Looking at her blank faced for a minute, Stewart shook his head. “Yes my dear he does, but I’m thinking the whole damn Taskforce should concentrate on you two…er..three,” he said glancing down at the loveseat-sized were grizzly on the floor.

“Director Stewart, would you be so kind as to give my resignation to the President?” Gina said, handing him an envelope. She had borrowed pen, paper and envelope from Gramps.

The Director raised his bushy white eyebrows, looking a lot like Mark Twain.

“That is a precipitous decision, my dear. Are you certain?” he asked.

“Yes, I am. He doesn’t trust my judgment and doesn’t listen to my advice. Also, he is correct in assuming that I’m ‘compromised’ if he means that my loyalties lie with Chris, Tanya and company. I know which side of the Good vs. Evil thing I stand on,” she said with conviction.

He looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. He turned to leave, but Gramps spoke before he got out the door.

“What will you recommend?”

Stewart looked back at him for a long moment, long enough that I thought he might not answer.

“The truth, Mr. Gordon, at least as I see it. An attack on your grandson here carries more negatives than positives in my estimation. At best it will start a war with a nation that has penetrated every other nation on earth and can gut the US economy at will. At worst….?,” he looked my way, eyes narrowed, “…well, let’s just say that I’m having trouble imagining all the bad things that could result from a failed attempt…and I have a vivid imagination.”

I didn’t tell him the interesting ideas that Grim had shown me about the satellites overhead. Better to hold some things back.

***

With Stewart and gang gone, Tanya and I made sure Gramps was okay, a condition that was obvious by the energy and vigor he showed cleaning up the kitchen. He then insisted on heading out to see how his farm was doing.

I looked at my vampire after Gramps had driven off in his beloved six-wheeled ATV. “You probably added several years to his life by giving him your blood,” I stated.

“It may be more than that. Dr. Singh thinks that my blood is several magnitudes more effective than other vampires. I may have added several decades to his life,” she answered, smugly. Her blue eyes narrowed, focusing on my throat and the pulse in my neck. “But I would rather talk about your blood,” she said with a sly, hungry grin.

I put one hand over my neck and attempted to look scared. She laughed. “Of course if you’re reluctant, I could always see if one of the Pack wants to donate. Werewolves are so very fit!” she said, lasciviously.

I growled involuntarily at the thought, then moved, scooping her up and hauling her to my old bedroom.

***

After Tanya’s snack and all that followed, we visited the Pack next door to see how they were getting on.

Kelly showed off the transformed milk room which had become the production facility for the line of natural pemmican bars she and two of the wolves made. The modern pemmican recipe that I had shown her had been tweaked and improved, quickly becoming a big hit through the New York Pack’s chain of sporting goods stores. Lupine Sports had initially placed the product in the hiking and camping section of their stores where it was a good addition to the other hiking foods. But the energy dense treats had found favor with the martial arts side of the store as a quick pick me up.

“Beef is the mainstay, but venison flavored is in the most demand. We’re just about ready to roll out bison and elk flavors,” Kelly told me while I looked over the sales numbers she had provided me. My review was cursory as I had faith in the weres and I wasn’t overly concerned about my investment in the business. The startup money I had supplied had been found money; money realized from a bet.

Tanya took the report from my hands and analyzed it in a glance.

“Kelly, your sales have tripled!” she said.

The tall Alpha looked pleased at her words. “Yeah, we really can’t keep up. This space isn’t big enough,” she said with a sigh.

“You should expand,” Tanya said. Our link told me that her business sense was thoroughly intrigued.

“That’s an issue. I’ve been trying to talk Brett into getting a loan from his father. I found a mothballed meat packing plant nearby that would be perfect and fairly cheap. Getting a bank loan is out of the question, none of the local banks will entertain the idea…too new. Brett is reluctant to ask his father for anything more than the distribution help he’s already provided. Now I’ve got other sporting goods companies asking for the product and I can’t supply it.”

Tanya and I exchanged a glance. “We’ll loan you the money. Write up a request and shoot it to Chris by email. Rates are low right now, so ask for enough to really do what you need to,” she said.

Kelly looked excited. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. I’ve actually seen the in-store response at your father-in-law’s headquarter store, plus these numbers look great. I’ve….we’ve got money sitting around not earning enough interest so this would be good for us as well,” Tanya said.

I’m okay financially, but Tanya’s wealth was in the big leagues. I didn’t pay much attention to money, letting my grandfather manage my trust and letting Tanya handle my Coven pay. All of my living expenses were handled by the Coven, so I wasn’t even sure how much money had built up in my vampire run accounts.

Kelly looked at me for confirmation of Tanya’s words. “Don’t look at me – she’s the financial genius!”

“It’s true, he doesn’t have much interest in these matters,” my vampire sighed, giving me a mock glare. I shrugged – what could I say?

The sound of a vehicle engine caught my ear – Gramps on his ATV approaching from the trail to the farm. Thirty seconds later he roared up in a cloud of dust and virtually hopped out of the six-wheeler. Kelly looked thoughtful as she watched the spring in his step then glanced first at Tanya than me. Tanya suddenly found the three page report to be utterly fascinating and I wasted no time intercepting my spring chicken of a grandfather.

“Hey Chris, Len came up with an idea. Can you leave these two alone for awhile?”

I glanced at the ladies. “They probably won’t get into too much trouble…”

Tanya crossed her arms. “Bullshit, Gordon! You and your devious grandsire are like kids in a dynamite store!”

I took a moment to reflect on how very far my vampire’s snark factor had come since I met her.

She smirked at me.

“And remember….he’s supposed to be resting!” she admonished. Gramps rocked on his heels, hands behind his back, trying to look innocent.

“Yes Dear,” I said, earning myself a much darker glare.

Gramps and I hopped into the six-wheeler, the old man spinning the little rig around in a circle, then sending it rumbling down the rutted path.

“So whatcha got?” I asked.

“Whadda ya know about EFP’s?” he asked.

“EFP’s? Is that related to ESP?” I asked puzzled.

“Not even remotely. Come on –time to hit the workshop!” he said, making it sound like the Batcave.

Chapter 24

We found Len in the farm’s workshop which looked like what you would get if a carpenter and a mechanic went into the employment of a mad scientist. Mostly used to fix various tractors and mechanical farm gear, with the occasional building repair project thrown in, it also housed my Grandfather’s reloading equipment and acted as storage for outdoor gear.

Len was using a machine press to punch out little discs of copper from some old metal roofing. He had various sizes of them ranging from an inch in diameter to some that must have been three inches across. Near his left elbow, an Apple iPad was propped up on its folded cover, looking incredibly out of place.

Taking off his safety goggles, Len looked my way, then beckoned us over to the bench.

“EFP’s Chris, ever heard of them?” Len asked. I shook my head.

“Explosively formed projectiles. It’s a variation of a shaped charge, used to attack armored objects from a distance,” he said.

“Okay, I know that modern anti-armor rockets usually have one or more shaped charges to blow holes in tank armor, but a shaped charge has to be actually touching the surface doesn’t it?” I asked. Growing up the table talk at the farm would have been considered very masculine, covering everything from politics, sports, hunting season, to modern warfare methods, with the occasional farm topic thrown in for good measure.

“Right. EFP’s turn shaped charges into distance weapons,” Len said.

I had seen them use shaped charges to blast a field boulder into pebbles and remove a giant tree stump. Shaping the explosives into a concave cone directed the explosive forces in the direction of the open end of the cone. Flower pots were perfect forms for packing with plastic explosive because of the cone shape.

“Here’s the difference,” Len said holding up a disc of copper. “A slightly concave liner of copper or steel is placed over the end of the shaped charge. When triggered, the explosive punches the metal into a bullet shape lump of molten metal traveling at supersonic speeds. They tend to punch through armor and spall metal bits all over the inside of armored vehicles. Big problem for our troops in ‘Stan and Iran.”

Gramps picked up the iPad and triggered a video that was already cued up. The display showed a graphic of how the projectile was molded by the explosion and then displayed many real life examples of the effects on US vehicles.

“So you think I should be making up explosive devices?” I asked, scratching my head.

They both shook their heads, but Gramps was the one who answered. “No, we thought maybe you could pretty much duplicate the explosive part,” he said, waving his hands in the air like the talent show magician.

“Oh!” I said, suddenly catching on. “Oh! Maybe I could at that.”

It took the rest of the afternoon to figure out and develop some degree of skill, but by focusing my aura the right way, I could turn a three inch disc of copper into an inch and a half diameter bullet that easily punched through two inches of cold rolled steel plate.

The best technique was to dimple the disc with my fingers so it was slightly concave. Then if I stood it upright on a fence or wall (chewing gum provided a field expedient stand) with the raised dimple pointing at me, I could clap my aura encrusted hands together and fire off the projectile. I had used the clap before to squash hellhounds and other nasties so that part was easy. The aiming part was a lot harder.

Basically, I could hit stuff ten or twenty feet away, but further than that and my chances dropped like a lead balloon.

After my third miss, I turned to find Tanya watching from behind the two old men. Noticing my stare, they turned to find her within a few feet of them. Len jumped, clearly not comfortable with her stealth. Gramps just sighed.

She smirked at their reactions.

“Trying to induce another heart attack, T?” Gramps asked. Len was nowhere near that nonchalant. He understood what she was and knew, theoretically, that she was on our side, but Len had lived through a lot of dangerous times by listening to his instincts. I’m pretty sure his instincts screamed at him everytime she was near.

Tanya frowned at my grandfather’s words, then slid forward like smoke. She patted his check, leaned in close holding his eyes with hers and said, “Never. Ever!” Then she smiled and continued on to me.

“Can I try?” she asked. I raised both eyebrows at the thought, then gestured for her to take a stab.

Inspecting the various discs, she selected one of the smallest, about an inch in diameter. A slight touch of one well-manicured, steel hard fingernail dented the disc like a miniature Chinese hat.

She examined my launch station, which to the uninformed might appear to be a two-by-four driven end on into the dirt on the small handgun range just outside the shop. Wrinkling her perfect nose at the wad of peppermint chewing gum on the top of the post, she bent over to position her disc.

As her back was to us and her jeans were of the low-rise, tight fitting type, our gazes simultaneously dropped to the perfect form on display.

Without turning around, she tsked. “Men!”

Len and Gramps immediately looked embarassed but I just grinned at her with one eyebrow raised when she finally glanced back. My link told me she was far from offended.

The disc set up to her satisfaction, she stepped back three feet, bent over again (which caused another round of involuntary head tilting on my part, the old men were careful to look away) and sang a single note.

While my hearing is well beyond human, I still remain tone deaf, so I can’t tell you what range the note was in, but the effect was a folded projectile moving slightly faster than the speed of sound that twanged off the armor, leaving a respectable gouge.

She frowned, clearly disappointed.

I patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, you have other talents,” I said with a smirk then danced away. She was faster than I, her open handed smack on my shoulder sounding like a gunshot. Okay, note to self: do not patronize vampire princess.

“I should be able to do better,” she hissed.

Len, who looked very pale, cleared his throat.

“Why?” he asked, then hurried on at her glare. “I mean why try to make a projectile at all? You probably don’t need them.”

“Explain, please,” she said, still frowning but interested.

“Well, you have control of your voice right? Theoretically, the sound waves you form should be just as deadly,” he said.

Just what the hell were these guys reading at night? I made a note to check to coffee table for textbooks.

Gramps was nodding. “Popular Science had an article about directed sound weapons the military is exploring. It’s in the house somewhere.”

“Directed sound weapons?” Tanya asked intrigued.

“Yeah, the military is looking at sound as an area denial weapon that’s nonlethal. Certain levels of sound that create discomfort and pain. You could likely do that, but what I was thinking of was a small sorta ‘packet’ of sound that would punch a hole in something hard,” Len said, still nervous.

“Like when you blew a hole in the rock in that mine…in Mexico,” I said.

Her frown cleared like a raincloud blown away in a breeze. “Oh! I had forgotten that. I was very angry at the time,” she said, thoughtful.

Gramps and Len exchanged a glance with eyebrows raised, clearly not comfortable with the mental image of an angry Tanya.

The vampire in question was lost in recollection, but after a moment she got a ‘eureka’ expression. Walking close to the metal plate that was her target she started to bend over, stopped and glared back at us then stood straight instead. She sang a note. The metal sang back. She tried another note, with more power. The plate tinged in response. Nodding to herself, she ran up the scale and back down stopping at a particular note. A deep breath, a slight bend at the waist and a single powerful tone exploded out of her throat. The metal ‘spanged’, a bright spot of light showing in its center.

The three of us walked up to her and her target. A dime sized hole with clean edges had been punched straight through.

“Hah Christian!” she said in triumph. “Leonard is correct. I don’t need stupid pieces of metal!”

“No dear you don’t,” I agreed, looking at the damaged plate.

“How are you going to carry discs of metal around anyway?” she asked, a bit dismissively.

I raised one eyebrow at her, reached in my jeans pocket and pulled out a quarter. A quick squeeze of my fingers bent the coin. A slight toss in the air and a clap as it came down sent a silver colored streak into the earthen backstop where a ten inch diameter crater appeared in the moist dirt.

She raised one eyebrow back at me, then grinned slyly. “Not bad,” she allowed. “But I always have my voice.”

Behind her I saw alarm flicker across both Len and Gramps faces and both started to shake their heads at me in warning. I ignored them.

“That you do T, that you do,” I said with a smirk.

Her glare could have peeled paint. Her punch to my already sore shoulder felt like a brick breaker.

Chapter 25

The message was waiting on both our cell phones when we got back to the farm house. A text directed us to check in with the Coven and when Tanya made the call the dispatch center directed us to return to New York and the Citadel.

“What’s up?” I asked, noting both her puzzled expression and the mental buzz on our private link.

“I’m not sure. I didn’t get to talk to Lydia or Nika or any of the others, which is odd. They were all in meetings,” she replied.

“Well it is a busy place, but I could call Chet,” I suggested, expecting her to say no.

“That’s a good idea,” she answered, her bright blue eyes alert. The bond between us told me that her political instincts were humming.

“Dude! How’s things?” I asked when I got through to Chet.

“Yo man! Good to hear your voice! I hear you and the beautiful one are coming in soon,” my brainy buddy answered.

“Yeah, we’re on our way. What’s up? Any ideas?” I asked.

“Something big,” he said. “I’ve been told to double up on IT security. New encryptions, changing the biometrics on the system access, the whole nine yards! There’s a meeting that’s suddenly been called…something called a Conclave?”

Tanya stiffened across my bedroom where she was packing her suitcase. I watched her body language and got a bad feeling.

“Well, we’re heading out soon so we’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Great, travel safe,” was his response.

I turned off my phone and watched my personal night angel speed up her packing, tension radiating with every motion.

“T?” I asked.

She stopped and looked my way.

“A Conclave is an extremely rare event in our world, even rarer than in the Roman Catholic church,” she said.

“Wait, isn’t that where the Cardinals pick a new Pope?”

“Yes. Ours is used to pick a new Elder,” she said, her tone flat.

“You pick your Elders?” I asked, confused. “I thought they sorta appointed themselves based on age and overall degree of bad assness?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. It usually works out that way, but it is still a formal process. The eldest vampires in the world will all convene and vote to pick the next Elder…the one to replace Fedor.”

“That was over two years ago. They’re just getting around to it now?” I asked.

“Chris, two years is an eyeblink for the older ones. You don’t know what they’re like,” she said, looking pensive. “I..we thought it might not be for four or five more years. Something or someone must have stirred things up. They never move this fast.”

“Senka’s not like that. In fact, she always seems to be...well not in a hurry, but at least not dawdling either,” I said.

“Senka is very unique. She’s also extremely excited about us,” she said, waving her hand between us.

“What do you mean?”

“Chris, you’ve only known her for a couple of years. Our introduction stirred things up. That’s why she’s mostly here in the States so much. She’s very old, and the old ones get lethargic, tired of life. But when I was ‘born’ she got very interested. Re-awakened as it were. Then you bumbled into the picture and she’s like a newly Turned vampire, her interest in life and the world completely revived.”

I still didn’t know much about the politics of the vampire world. I knew that the North American coven was considered a relatively new enterprise and Lydia had mentioned that Europe and Asia were the bastions of most of the old vampires.

“So why are you bothered?”

“The last Conclave happened three hundred and fifty years ago. It was, by every account I’ve read or heard, an extremely bloody affair. Sometimes they go easy and other times they’re open warfare.”

“Who was elected last time?” I asked.

“Senka,” she said. “There was a lot of opposition. Her ideas and beliefs didn’t sit well with many of the others.”

“I thought she and Tzao were the oldest?” I asked.

“They pretty much are, now that Fedor is dead. But Senka has always been something of a progressive sort. The old vampires, even though they are mostly younger than her, don’t like change. Many of them are not fans of her ideas.”

“What ideas?”

Tanya paused and considered. My link to her told me she was concerned about her choice of words.

“Senka has different ideas about humans,” she said, carefully, frozen over a folded sweater.

“You mean she sees humans more as people and not just as food?” I asked.

She was surprised. “Yes, Christian, that is what I mean,” she said, one perfect eyebrow slightly raised.

“Lydia has told me that what I’ve seen in the NY Coven isn’t the norm. I mentioned once that I thought vampires would be much more violent, bloody and such. She told me that they are, that in most parts of the world they treat humans much differently.”

“You never mentioned that conversation?”

I shrugged. “I’ve always had a short-term outlook on life, T. I never thought I’d live to twenty-five. So I just thought I’d take your world as it came. I saw how the Loki Spawn treated life, human or were, so I don’t think I will be shocked.”

“I’m not worried about shocked, Christian. I’m worried about explosive rage. You are very dangerous, but you haven’t gone up against vampires in the 700 year class. And it won’t be just one or two, but many more, maybe several dozen, each with a retinue of forty or more younger Darkkin.”

A thought occurred to me.

“How do they treat you?”

A flicker of emotion crossed her face, too fast to identify by sight. My bond told me it was distaste mixed with a tiny amount of fear.

“Beings who have been alive for seven, eight or nine centuries are not impressed with the idea of a born vampire. Some ignore me, some are mildly interested, some are….unpleasant,” she said.

She was deliberately downplaying the unpleasant part, worried about my reaction. What can I say, I’m consistent.

“What do you mean unpleasant?” I asked, my voice changed by Grim’s surge of anger.

She watched me struggle with myself, felt the conflict through our bond, concern written across her features.

“This will not do, Christian. You cannot lose control around these Darkkin. Neither of us will survive it!” she said.

“Neither?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“Yes, my hot tempered Chosen, neither of us. If you, how do you say, ‘freak out’, you will start a fight you cannot win – and I will be forced to join you,” she said, watching to make sure I understood.

If I Hulked out over the actions of one of these older vamps and got drawn into a fight, she would never let me fight on my own. We would both die.

She nodded as she watched my reaction.

“It’s more than that, Christian. These Darkkin are adept at manipulating others. We will undoubtedly be tested to see if we can be used against rivals, to destabilize alliances or even weaken Senka’s position. They’ve had centuries to practice, to learn the intrigues of every civilization on earth. We are not remotely a match for them.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be there?” I suggested, my stomach suddenly informing me that it was considering hurling. I sucked at politics at the playground level. I wouldn’t have a prayer at the vampire Olympic level.

“We absolutely shouldn’t,” she agreed. “But we have to. You were there at Fedor’s death and we were both part of the events that led to his demise. Our presence at the next Conclave is mandated.”

“So what do we do?”

“We listen, we watch. We absolutely refrain from reacting to perceived insults and innuendos. We run everything we hear or see past Senka. We do exactly what she tells us to do, no more, no less.”

It wouldn’t work – not for me. I hated Survivor on television or any of those other shows that depended on mercurial alliances and group politics. I had always lived outside those groups, never learning to operate by their rules.

She read me like a book.

“We have many, many advantageous, zayka. The Citadel is our territory, every inch of its electronics are controlled by Chester. Nika is the strongest telepath in the vampire world. Senka and Tzao are on our side. We also are…popular I guess you could call it, with the younger vampires.”

“And offsetting all of that is my temper,” I said. She stood still over her toiletry bag, her shiny black hair a curtain over her face.

My temper has always been a factor. But I challenge you to live my life and not have a few anger issues. Add a syringe of demon blood and a separate personality that thrives on combat and suddenly the term ‘anger management’ becomes a life path and not just the title of a funny movie.

“Grandmother will have some ideas on that Christian, but you have to promise me you will restrain your dark side,” she said, her link worried.

I sighed and nodded. “Hell, maybe I can just avoid most of the meetings?” I pondered.

“Maybe,” she responded.

***

Five hours later found us in Manhattan, maneuvering our car down to the lowest level of an underground parking garage. Slotting the car into an empty slot near the back of the level, we hopped out and grabbed our bags.

The elevator had numbers for all the levels above us, but when Tanya pressed her right thumb over an innocuous black square on the top of the control panel the numbers started to go down instead of up.

The doors opened into a concrete hallway with a door that could have worked nights as a bank vault. This time my vampire used a retina scanner and the two-foot thick door popped open with a soft hiss.

A six pack of Arkady’s security vampires awaited us, quickly loading our luggage onto a stretch golf cart that immediately careened down long empty hallways. We were on the outskirts of Citadel and after a moment or two I realized we were using one of the least utilized access points. Coming home by the back door as it were.

Well before reaching the center of the complex we turned off, heading in a direction I had never been before, not that I’ve ever seen the entirety of the complex. Citadel was built to house and protect the entire New York Coven during times of danger and included space enough for several thousand people. As the Coven only numbers 300-500 vampires at the best of times, there is plenty of room. So it wasn’t shocking that I had never seen this stretch of tunnels before, but what was a surprise was the number unfamiliar vampires we were passing. My ability to gauge the age of a vampire was telling me that the Darkkin we were seeing were mostly in the 400-600 year range. In all my time in Citadel or even in the Big Apple, I had only seen a handful of vampires in that age group.

Our cart came to a halt in front of a group of vampires. Arkady and Lydia were in the front, but I noted several much older vampires, including a giant that I had seen once before. There were also quite a few younger vamps that I knew to be locals.

Tanya hopped out of the cart and walked up to Arkady and Lydia. I got out the opposite side of the cart and had to walk around it. I was still approaching when Tanya gave a small, formal bow and said: “Rover Team 29 present.” No friendly greeting to people who were family.

“Rover Demidova, welcome back,” Arkady said. The omission of the title that Arkady had practically coined, ‘Young Queen’ was glaringly obvious. The feeling of relief I got from Tanya was palpable. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much pressure Tanya felt from that two word phrase.

Arkady glanced at me. “Rover Gordon,” was his greeting.

“Security Chief Barsukov,” I replied with a bow as close to Tanya’s as possible. Our link practically wrapped me in her approval of my actions as well as a message; we were being watched and judged.

The giant vampire behind Arkady moved forward. I think his name was Ondrej. He was Senka’s bodyguard and possibly the largest individual I’d ever seen. Over seven feet tall and had to go well past 300 pounds.

“You will come with me, Rover,” he said to Tanya, his voice like two boulders rubbing together.

I started to follow, but he froze me with a stare. “Not you Gordon. You go with Hosokawa-san,” he said, motioning with his chin at another older vampire. Five foot, five and built like a gymnast, I had also met Hosokawa before. He was Elder Tzao’s bodyguard. Pitch black eyes locked onto me and he waved me after him. Behind us our luggage was swiftly disappearing from the cart, headed to our quarters I hoped.

Chapter 26

Hosokawa led me silently through the hallways, his steps eerily silent on the concrete floors. Several minutes of walking brought us to a gymnasium that was busy with vampires sparring with both weapons and without. Sidelong glances followed us as we walked through the large space to a doorway at the rear. Passing through the small archway led into a smaller studio space, maybe twenty-five feet by fifty. A rack of weapons was fastened to the far wall. I had been thinking that Hosokawa’s black uniform looked much like a martial arts gi.

Hosokawa stepped to the center of the room and turned to face me. Behind me an unknown vampire closed the door, which part of me noted was heavy steel. Locking bolts ratcheted into place.

The small dangerous vampire in front of me was over 800 years old and his face was a frozen mask that gave nothing away.

“You are ill prepared to face a Conclave,” he stated as fact. Not knowing what to say, I decided to say nothing. I know…shocking. Mark a calendar.

“I will prepare you,” he said, another fact.

His bow was fast, his attack much, much faster. Too fast for me…without Grim. The rear wall of the room was hard, at least according to my head and right shoulder which had just slammed into it. I wasn’t sure just what he had done.

He was frowning. “I was told you were faster than that?” he asked, sounding offended.

I shook concrete dust from my throbbing head and moved forward. “Part of me is,” I said.

That particular part was howling to get out. I let it.

“Part of you?” he said.

I just nodded and continued to approach. He slid forward as if on grease, his front foot headed for my sternum. Grim stepped us slightly to the right, just enough for the calloused foot to slide under my left arm, which trapped it. Another step put my right foot behind his left, my right hand slamming a palm heel to his chest.

In the world of human jiu-jitsu, this combination of moves will often result in your opponent falling to the floor, leg still trapped by your arm. In vampire-fu, with an opponent who had probably helped create jiu-jitsu the result was not so much. Hosokawa had Posted his balancing leg, effectively turning it into an iron rod sunk deep in the earth. He would not be falling over anytime soon.

The fun part about my demonically influenced combat personality is that he’s nothing if not adaptable. In fact, I almost felt a mental nod acknowledging a theory proven.

The take down ineffective, Grim pulled us close to the Japanese vampire, dropping the leg and shooting both arms under Hosokawa’s armpits, Posting our own legs in place – then he Pulled on the rack of weapons. All manner of swords, spears and other sharp pointy things shot straight at us and more importantly, the exposed back of our/my opponent.

Hosokawa exploded upwards, propelled by powerful vampire legs, yanking himself right out of my arms and leaving me to face the sword storm. Grim yanked my body to the floor, and Pushed the incoming blades upward with my right hand.

Rolling backwards on the floor, I came up in time to see all the blades but one, miss the vampire who was Clinging to the ceiling. One small knife blade tore the bottom of his pants, but otherwise missed him completely. Grim snatched a falling spear from the air and jabbed at the black form that was spidered on the concrete above.

Hosokawa rolled, folded and slipped away from every attack. Then he flicked his right hand in my direction and I was Pulled to the ground as if gravity had suddenly quadrupled. Somehow, he had projected his energy into the concrete below me and then exerted it against me.

I was trapped by a column of vampire energy, unable to move as my opponent dropped lightly to the ground. Grim wasn’t done though, instead ratcheting up our response by using my aura to slice the pillar of energy holding me down.

I jumped up and back, clearing ten feet from Hosokawa, who was watching me curiously. Looking down, he examined the small cut in his pants leg before looking back up with a slight nod.

“It’s a start,” he said, softly. Then he attacked again. And again. And again.

I remember sparring with my first martial arts instructor as a kid. He taught both karate and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, with a habit of combining the two in one session. In other words, mixed martial arts. We would start on our feet, but inevitably end up on the ground, where he would usually find a new form of choke, arm bar or muscle split to inflict on me. Five minutes felt like an hour, leaving me heaving for breath as I tried to repay a ridiculous oxygen debt.

Twenty minutes of non-stop vampire sparring was on another planet of energy expenditure. At speeds of ten times or more faster than the best human reaction time, twenty minutes becomes hours in human time.

Soaked in sweat, my body trembled as I struggled to find a way to stop the fight. I had already literally used a whole day’s supply of calories and my reserves were gone. The metabolic beast that is my body had depleted the tank, used up the emergency supply and was in danger of consuming the rest of me if it didn’t get fed soon.

In fact, Grim had switched from sparring mode to survival mode, now looking to truly kill, maim or incapacitate my enemy, as my life depended on it. My aura was almost exhausted, having been eroded against my opponent over the course of our match. His uniform was now mostly shredded, the black showing a dull gray sheen underneath. The gray was some type of chainmail he wore that I had quickly figured out was formed from depleted uranium. Seventeen minutes ago, when Grim had gone into kill mode, I had blasted the vamp with a burst of aura that should have removed his legs. It destroyed the black cloth, but was ineffective against his DU armor.

Crouched at the far end of the room, myself studied the vampire. Two forms of vision overlapped. One mostly normal, the other an overlay that outlined his form in sharp slashes of red. Each red line was a weak point in his armor, the brighter the red, the closer I had come to penetrating it. Myself was studying those spots intently. Aura was almost gone, eroded by a fight that had started as sparring but become a dance to the death.

A huge impact struck the steel door behind him. He jumped. I didn’t. Myself knew what or who was on the other side, demanding in.

The vampire shifted left. An electrical conduit caught my dark half’s eye. It was the kind run on the outside of concrete walls. Coming down from the ceiling it ended at an outlet box. Myself noted others just like it around the room, with the closest being six feet to my left. The outlet box was steel, with circular cutouts that could be knocked open for wire access. Each steel knockout was the size of a quarter.

Springing left, my fingers punched out two metal discs, tearing them free from the box. A shock jumped my hand when my fingers touched live wires but I barely noticed.

The vampire was moving toward me at speed, not recognizing my actions but determined to stop them.

Fingers dimpled the metal discs, hand tossed them into the air, both hands clapped. Both discs fired in supersonic bursts of molten metal. One struck the metal door, ripping through the thickest part of the upper hinge. The other hit the vampire in his left shoulder, blew through in a mist of blood and flesh, then blasted a crater from the wall.

The vampire rocked back, I headed forward and the steel door tore free from its remaining hinge.

“Stop!” the new vampire said. This one had blue eyes and black hair. This one I had to listen to. I stopped. Other vampires came into the room. I moved back to the far end.

A little female flitted in. She carried food. My sight telescoped onto the plastic jar that read ‘Skippy’.

“Just throw it to him, Lyd,” the one I must listen to said. Mine.

The jar arced across the room, but I met it half way. The top came off and myself shoveled the brown oily paste into my mouth in gobs.

“So…what the fuck?” mine asked, voice quiet. I edged back at that tone.

“Demidova-san. Your Chosen is…surprising,” my enemy said, one arm hanging limply.

Two more vampires entered, one tiny and Asian, the other taller and blonde. All the other vampires bowed, except mine. She was angry. Very angry.

“Arashi? What has happened?” the tiny Asian vampire asked.

My enemy bowed. “Training, Elder.”

“And at what point of the training did you decide to attempt to kill my Chosen?” mine asked.

My enemy looked startled. He glanced around the room. I followed his gaze, still gobbling the nutty paste, squatting at the back of the room.

The room was in shambles. Craters gouged the floor, walls and ceiling. Two of the concrete buttresses had enormous impact cracks. Scorch marks and burns were everywhere.

“I have not had a match like this in seven centuries. I lost myself in battle. I have failed,” my enemy said, his tone flat.

The blonde vampire spoke in a voice used to being obeyed. “Doctor?”

A male vampire moved forward, his skin dark. I knew him, he was no threat to me.

“I’ve not seen a wound like this before. It’s completely cauterized. Like a plasma burn. The tissue will have to be abraded down to raw tissue. It will be painful.”

“That’s a start,” the little Asian said. They all turned to me. I finished the jar, my attention back on the little female with the food.

“Throw him the donuts,” mine said. I caught the box halfway across the room and retreated, grabbing a broken sword blade on my way back. Tearing open the box, I shoved a donut in my mouth, then jammed the blade into the concrete in front of me. My fingers squeezed the top of the sword where the steel had snapped, forming it, molding the metal into a flat square that faced the vampires. Tiny aura claws on my right fingers scored the steel in a four-by-four grid.

“What is he doing?” the blond bossy one asked.

“He’s simultaneously replenishing reserves while preparing a defensive weapon to kill Hosokawa. The blade will act like a mini-Claymore mine when he claps his hands, sending about twenty explosively formed projectiles across the room,” mine explained.

“The fight is stopped. Why is he doing that?” the blonde asked.

“Because Hosokawa has pushed him so far into survival mode that he sees no way out except to kill everything that threatens him. His body reserves are all gone and he had begun to cannibalize his own tissues.”

“Like a vampire who has been starved of blood for weeks,” the dark skinned male said.

“Like a vampire starved of blood for months or years!” mine corrected.

“How is that possible?” the tiny Asian asked.

“He burns calories like a were, but if he simultaneously engages in combat and uses his aura, the burn rate multiplies. Hosokawa started this as a sparring match, right?” mine asked.

“Hai, Demidova-san,” my enemy agreed, swaying on his feet.

“When did it escalate?”

“Ah…” my enemy was lost in thought. “After he tried to push me with his…aura? Yes, after that. I think he noticed the armor then. It got…exciting after that.”

“So, he didn’t know about the armor. He faced his first older vampire, got his ass handed to him, Grim took over and then found out about the armor. He still controlled it as he never pulled the ceiling down on you, but as the fight went on and he used up more reserves, both energy and aura, he got more desperate.”

“Pull down the ceiling?” the blonde asked.

“He’s thinking about doing it now. His energy levels are back up enough. Lydia, throw him the protein bars, please.”

“He could pull down the ceiling? And why are you throwing everything to him?” the blonde asked.

“I think he could pull a satellite or asteroid down from space if he was sufficiently motivated. Right now he’s pretty motivated and if I leave this part of the room to go to him, he’ll probably do something drastic to everyone on this side of the room.”

The vampires were all silent for a moment, staring at me as I tore through the box of chewy bars.

“He fought well?” the blonde finally asked my enemy.

“Hai! Best fight I’ve had,” he replied. “I need to heal for a rematch.”

“No! You still don’t get it do you?” mine said, stamping one foot hard enough to crack more of the floor.

“I told you…stop pushing him. But no one listens to me, do they? I’m the one linked to him, I’m the one who sees what happens each and every time,” she said.

They all just stared at her. She went on.

“His other personality, Grim, just went through a half hour doctoral program in fighting both older vampires and ones that are armored in depleted uranium. Trust me when I tell you that he learned everything you could teach him and more. The very next time he fights either or both he will have adapted all his strategies. He won’t spar, he won’t hold back. He will blast your head off your body, rip the floor out from under you, create a spear of energy so sharp and focused that it will slice through your armor like tissue. That’s what Grim does…learn and adapt to combat. You threatened his survival. Grim’s only function is to ensure survival. In fact, it will be a struggle for Chris to keep Grim from killing you on sight, Arashi!” she said.

The center of my chest warmed suddenly. The God Tear made its presence known. I glanced down then touched it. Tanya spun at my motion.

“You back?” she asked softly.

I held one peanut butter covered hand out flat and wobbled it back and forth. “Sorta,” I said.

“Doctor, please take Hosokawa-san for treatment,” Senka said, not taking her eyes off me.

“Ah, hey Spikey, got anything to drink? I got peanut butter mouth,” I asked Lydia, who walked over and handed me the last item she held. A large size Monster energy drink. Perfect.

Chapter 27

We left the gym, passing a crushed golf cart that appeared to have been thrown into the steel door. Several vampires remained in the larger gym space and they all stopped to stare. Now that I was coming back to myself, I became aware of my condition. Drying blood matted the back of my head, my clothes were torn and blood-soaked, my hands and face covered in a greasy mix of donut crumbs and peanut butter. Vampire noses sniffed my blood, but the angel of death walking next to me helped them keep their restraint.

Tanya led me to the locker room and pushed me gently into the shower. Senka left at that point, promising to check back later, but Nika showed up with clean sweats and some more food.

I stripped, which was easy as my clothes basically fell apart, and started to wash up. Tanya watched me morosely, while Lydia and Nika tried to talk to her. The fact that I was standing naked ten feet from them didn’t appear to bother them, although they completely failed to look away. In fact, all three sorta stared. Lydia even winked.

“Okay, so that was a disaster,” Lydia said.

Tanya shrugged, still looking at me. “If the intent was to train Chris on fighting older vampires, than it was a complete success.”

“He looked in tough shape,” Nika noted, motioning at me.

“He was moments from killing Hosokawa. His dark half will evolve new skills almost exponentially,” Tanya said, her voice flat.

“Sooo, that’s not all bad, right?” Lydia asked, trying to understand Tanya’s mood.

“Lydia, his dark side is learning and growing so fast that his other side might get left behind. If he reacts with ultra-violence to every stimulus, where will he be? Plus, he could have died in there,” she said with a sigh. “Sure, he’s probably got a duel well handled, but he is also prone to being on a hair trigger now. See, he’s been teaching his dark side to use degrees of response. But the so-called ‘training’ with Hosokawa wiped that control out. It taught him that measured responses will get you killed. Respond with overwhelming force instantly.”

“Oh! Maybe he could work with Hosokawa to re-learn it?” Lydia suggested.

“That’s unlikely to be a good idea, Lyd,” Tanya said.

“So I stay away from nasty old vampires as much as possible,” I said, turning off the shower and grabbing a towel and the sweats.

“That is a start,” Tanya said, as we climbed into another golf cart for a fast ride to our quarters. “You will not need to be around for much of the opening events, but you do need to be with me for a few of the formal announcements.”

“Why don’t I go over the cast of characters with him. Introduce him to the Deck of Significants, work on protocol and coven meeting survival,” Nika suggested. “I don’t need to be there for most of those events either, in fact my presence tends to make some uncomfortable.”

Even vampires get creeped out by a telepath that can read their every thought. She never let it show, but Tanya had told me that the beautiful blonde mind reader hated being shunned for her talents.

We pulled up in front of our suite of rooms and Lydia led the way inside.

“Deck of Significants?” I asked.

“Like a deck of playing cards, but more similar to say baseball cards,” Lydia answered. “Photos and stats on all the major players in our world.”

“I never heard of them before,” I commented.

“There is an enormous amount you haven’t been exposed to yet,” Tanya said. “That is actually a really good idea, Nika. Thank you.”

“Notta problem. Give me a chance to hang with my brother-in-law,” Nika said.

“Just don’t watch him eat…it’s disgusting!” Lydia said, a grimace on her face.

“Oh great! A vampire with a weak stomach!” I said.

“I’ll have Remy bring him more food,” Tanya said.

“Way ahead of you T. He should be on his way any moment,” Lydia said.

“Good! He doesn’t have much meat left on him,” Tanya said, smiling sadly at me.

“Oh, I don’t know. I saw lots of ‘meat’ a minute ago,” Lydia said, smirking.

Tanya snorted in amusement, kissed me goodbye, then towed my spikey-haired nemesis out of the room, leaving me with my blush.

Nika, ignoring the banter, headed to a set of Tanya’s drawers in the corner of our room and pulled a cloth bag from the top drawer, which I had thought was strictly the realm of bras and undies. Of course, anytime I had seen it open, I had been too distracted by the tiny wisps of silk, lace, cotton and nylon to notice anything else.

Nika smiled at my thought. “I would be worried if you had noticed anything else!”

Nika had trained me in shielding my mind from her, which it turns out was fairly easy to do with my aura, but I usually didn’t. Too many times in the past, all the way back to my first meeting with vampires, her ability to ‘see’ my thoughts had been beneficial.

“You’re in a very small minority that feels comfortable enough to do that,” she said, having again glimpsed inside my head.

“Lydia would say that I can’t form any thoughts worth hiding,” I said with a shrug.

“Lydia loves you like the little brother she lost,” Nika replied.

“Lost?”

“He died of Spanish Influenza when they were both little. She’s decided that you’ve replaced him. Which means that she is honor bound to poke and prod you.”

“Some of her comments are decidedly less than sisterly,” I said, thinking of the quip she left on.

“Well, you fill the role of little brother, but you’re not really related. It seems to have slipped your notice Chris, but most unrelated females are going to have a hard time ignoring your, eh , assets,” she said with a quick little smile.

“I’ve spent my whole life being ignored by the ladies, it’s hard to adjust is all,” I said.

“Most males would have gone hog wild with the attention,” she suggested.

“Umm, most don’t have my background,” I said, thinking of how the demons I hunted would treat a girlfriend or date.

Nika froze, motionless, as she read that train of thought. After a moment she locked her gaze to mine. “Thank you for sharing your past with me,” she said.

I double checked to see if she was sincere or sarcastic. Her even gaze and nod answered my question.

“Almost everyone around me goes on lockdown or outright panic when I’m nearby. But not you. That’s rare. Then you show me your past like just now. I appreciate the gift.”

I shuddered. “Most people wouldn’t think my past was much of a gift.”

“I see it filtered through your eyes, so I get the horror of what you have dealt with, but that horror is limited by the knowledge that you already dealt with those horrors…severely in every case,” she said. “It helps me understand you better. Anything that helps me understand the ‘Young Queen’s Chosen’ is valuable.”

I grimaced at that title. She nodded at both my expression and underlying thought.

“Tanya feels the same way, maybe more so. Too much pressure to be something that no one has even defined. The young vampires all revere her and the old ones are either threatened, insulted or amused by it.”

“Does she have a role to play in the Conclave?” I asked.

“No, not really. It’s just the old vampires, basically the ones over 600 years or so,” she answered. “That’s what the cards are for.”

She opened the cardboard box, which was black with red letters spelling ‘Significants’ in drippy looking letters. Then she pointed at the door, “Remy is here.”

I bolted to the door and pulled it open to find a small vampire pushing a waiter’s cart of food. He was not shocked by my abrupt opening of the door, but his expression was one of severe disapproval as he looked over my nutrient starved body. Tsking to himself, he guided the cart into the room and started setting out dish after dish of food. A storm of odors assailed me, an overwhelming mix of flavors. Lasagna, chicken parm, fried eggplant with mozzarella, two large steaks, four baked potatoes covered in bacon bits and sour cream, half a banana cream pie and a half gallon of raspberry sherbert. Remy reached down to the carts almost empty second level and pulled a metal pitcher and glass out.

“A Remy original protein smoothy. You will drink it all?”

It wasn’t really a question, more of an order from my chef.

“Yes sir,” I answered, already filling a plate.

“Good boy. This is all left overs. I’ll start on some fresh stuff,” he said, pushing the cart back out of the room with a wave.

Nika’s expression was incredulous as she took in the amount of food on the table and on my plate.

“You’re really going to eat all of that?”

“As a start,” I answered around a mouthful of chicken parm. ”Actually, this should fill me up, but it won’t last long.”

“How can you physically hold all that?” she asked, curious.

“Dr. Singh thinks that my body rips it apart far faster and more efficiently than a regular human would. All my digestive acids and enzymes are hopped up. The jar of peanut butter, donuts and protein bars are already gone. I feel like I haven’t eaten in days,” I said, patting my flat stomach.

“And you’re like that every day…all the time?”

“No, nothing like now. My average regular day is somewhere around 7,000 – 8,000 calories…about like an Olympic level swimmer in regular training. I actually get full and feel sated. But now, after fighting like that…well, it’s tough to get full.”

“You did look mighty skinny in the shower,” she said.

“Tanya says she can see me regain weight at times like this,” I said.

She tilted her head sideways, considering. “You know – she’s right! Your face looks fuller, discounting the mouth full of food, of course.”

I swallowed the eggplant I was chewing and nodded. “Of course,” I agreed with a grin.

“Okay, time for school,” Nika announced, fanning out the deck of cards. She plucked three right off the top, placing them in a row face up.

“The Elders: Senka, Tzao, and Fedor,” she announced. Fedor’s card had been crossed out with black magic marker. She tapped the center of the black X. “Hence the need for a Conclave.”

“The Patrons: there are currently eleven,” she said, laying out a second row of cards underneath the three Elder cards.

“From Turkey, Gultekin,” she pointed to the photo of a dark haired male.

“Japan is represented by Chika” she said, showing me a blank faced female. “Chika and Hosokawa will be the only older vamps from Asia besides Tzao, by the way.”

“Hosokawa is just a bodyguard, I thought.”

“No, he’s much more,” Nika said, handing me Hosokawa’s card.

“The Duelist?” I read.

“Some of the older vampires are known by additional terms…nicknames you might say. Arashi Hosokawa is the foremost duelist in our world. He has never lost a fight, almost all of which were death matches….till today.”

“Ah, he mostly kicked my ass, Nika,” I said.

“He had a three-inch hole blasted through his shoulder when I saw him headed out of the gym. I’ve never even heard of him being wounded.”

“So how many fights has he had?” I asked.

“Thousands,” was her answer.

“Great, so now I’ve pissed off the vampire reigning champion,” I said.

“His guard was down when I passed him. I caught a glimpse of his thoughts,” she said.

“And he hates me,” I said with a groan.

“Actually, I think he might be in love…at least in a bromance kinda way. He was so excited about finding someone that could give him a fight he wasn’t even bothered by the pain.”

“Oh,” was all I could muster.

“Now, next we have a bonded pair, Tavian and Elisabeta, both of Romanian descent, from Europe, both almost nine hundred years of age.”

“Wait, why are Hosokawa and….Chika the only ones from Asia?”

“Because Tzao has told the rest of them to stay home. Chika and Arashi will be their proxies and cast their votes for them,” she said.

“Runs a tight ship that Tzao does, huh?” I asked.

“You have not the faintest idea. But yes, and a good point to remember is that she is also on your side. And I do mean your side. She always sorta resented that Tanya was born to Senka’s line, but she has proof that your vampire genetics come from her line. That’s why she sent her foremost fighter to prepare you.”

“So that’s good right?”

“Very.”

“So tell me about Tavian and Elisabeta?” I asked.

“One of the oldest bonded pairs, over 900 years, they are of Vladislava’s line,” she answered.

“Vladislava?”

“A previous Elder. Fedor replaced her 400 odd years ago.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

“Treachery, which is what usually kills most older Darkkin; Elders and Patrons alike.”

“Makes you wonder why some don’t retreat from the Coven and live the quiet life,” I commented.

“There are rumors of some that have done just that, but they’re unsubstantiated. Back to Tavian and Elisabeta. They were supporters of Fedor, which sounds counter-intuitive, because he most likely engineered Vladislava’s demise. The key here is that Vladislava was a cruel bitch of an Elder and they hated her,” Nika said.

“Fedor was better than this Vladislava?” I asked, trying to picture that. My own interactions with the deceased Fedor hadn’t left me in his fan club. Plate empty, I headed up for a refill.

“Tough to believe, but actually he was. The point here is that these two will not be your friends.”

“Hey, wait, I didn’t bump off Fedor… a pissed off god did,” I protested.

She waved away my comment with one well-manicured hand. “Fedor died in your presence and it’s pretty well understood that he was in the process of killing you when your god friend intervened.”

I glanced at the furry mound of sleepy bear on the floor of the room. Awasos’s brown eyes met mine from where his half-keg sized head rested on his paws.

“Well, that chain of events worked out pretty well for me, so I’ll have to live with their hate,” I said.

“That’s the trick, Chris…living through an old vampire’s hate. You’ll need to watch out for them.”

“Either of them vying for the right to be the next Elder?”

“No, not according to the Darkkin rumor mill. There appears to be three contenders for the title. All three are from Europe, which makes senses, as the Elder, once appointed, will take charge of Fedor’s old haunts, unless Senka wants them. She won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Cause she would have to give up the Americas and she’s pretty attached to North America and the East Coast in particular,” Nika said, looking at me with a direct gaze.

“Oh, right, because Tanya is here, part of the North America Coven.”

She nodded. “That’s a big part, but she always liked these continents better. It’s been argued among Darkkin for decades that she was given charge of the dregs of the world when she was elected. But during her watch, Canada and the US were both settled, as were many parts of South America. Now the US is one of the richest countries on the planet, Canada is supplying oil, natural gas, timber and other natural resources to the world, Brazil is fast emerging as one of the strongest new nations, while other South American countries are beginning to thrive.”

“And in the meantime, Europe is having difficulties,” I added.

“Exactly,” she said, smiling. “But many of the older vampires still live in Europe, and still consider it to be the end all of vampire existence.”

“I would think there would be more old vampires in Asia,” I suggested.

“There may be, for all we know. Tzao isn’t really saying and the ones we do know don’t ever step out of line. A close knit group, that’s for sure. If they fight among themselves, they sure keep it well hidden. Europe on the other hand is one big dysfunctional family.

She laid out three cards next to each other.

“The three contenders: Lison, currently living in France, Frimunt, Austrian by birth region, and from old mother Russia, Mausya. All in their late 800’s. All pretty nasty pieces of work. Lison is ambitious, but not particularly motivated to help the Coven. She just wants power and influence. Frimunt has the whole German devotion to duty thing going for him, as well as a healthy dose of ruthlessness. Mausya…..well, Mausya is one evil tempered, nasty, devious piece of shit.”

“Nika, you can’t hold back if you want me to learn. Tell me how you really feel?” I said, with a deadpan expression. I had actually never heard her exhibit such emotion before.

She grinned, then went all serious again.

“Honestly, Chris, they’re all bad news but Mausya is the worst. My personal preference would be for Frimunt to be selected, but even Lison would be better than Mausya,” she said with a shudder.

I studied all the cards she had laid out. Tavian was dark of hair and looked aristocratic, probably considered handsome. Elisabeta looked cold but very attractive with deep red hair and penetrating gray eyes. Lison had black hair and fine, delicate features, looking like a French actress or model. Frimunt was blond, blue-eyed and broad shouldered, every inch the Aryan ideal. Finally, I came to the uber-bitch, Mausya. Mausya was….beautiful. Brown hair, brown eyes, long graceful neck. She was smiling for the camera, but when I looked close at her eyes, the smile wasn’t in them.

“Who makes these cards anyway?” I asked.

“It has varied over the centuries. Before photography, a particularly skilled artist would be commissioned to capture all the likenesses. Now, we just have them submit a digital photo to a Coven owned publishing company in Paris. The decks are produced or updated only when a change occurs. Darkkin collect them and display them. It’s a visual history of our most influential individuals,” she said. “Senka has a really neat collection, including one deck almost a thousand years old.”

She laid out four more cards.

“Liu, Sun, and Tan; all from Asia and staying home. Their votes go to Chika and Hosokawa-san. And the final Patron, from Peru, Jarib Salazar.”

“So how does this voting thing work?” I asked.

“Each of the Patrons gets two votes. There are also several other vampires like Hosokawa who are considered Officers of the Conclave. They each get one vote,” she said, laying out three more cards and moving Hosokawa’s card down with them.

“Hosokawa is Guardian of the Conclave. He either keeps the peace or oversees formal Challenges. Atta is Registrar. She records and tallies all the votes, keeps the minutes such as they are and writes the formal pronouncement of the Conclave. Gault is the Prolocutor. He runs the Conclave, keeps the meeting on track, that sort of thing. He’s got a tough job,” she said, giving me a look.

I could just imagine trying to keep order among the giant egos of old vampires.

“Berit is last. She is the Adjudicator,” Nika said, her voice a little tight. I raised one eyebrow and after a moment she explained. “She is a powerful telepath, like me. When the Conclave requires testimony, Berit will rule on the witness’s truthfulness.”

“Nika, what kind of testimony would the Conclave need to hear?” I asked slowly, a bad feeling in my almost full stomach.

“Conclave’s are only called when an Elder has died and must be replaced. It is traditional to establish the details of the Elder’s passing prior to selecting their replacement.”

“So it’s like a murder trial?” I asked.

“No, not really. It establishes the sequence of events leading to the Elder’s death. In some ways it’s like an education for the new Elder on what to avoid and how to survive. It lays out the framework of who did what to whom. Alliances may be revealed or secret enemies exposed. But that’s just the beginning of the show,” she said, getting up and helping herself to a bag of blood from the fridge. She popped it into the warming unit, which uses a bath of spinning hot water to heat the blood to body temperature. Kinda like a wine chiller in reverse.

I, myself, had been steadily refilling my plate and had finished off the entrees. I moved onto the pie and sherbet.

“So, you’re saying that I’m likely to be called to explain what happened to Fedor. All of his fans will hate me and Berit will rummage through my head like this deck of cards,” I said, picking up the remaining pile of cards. There were a few left so I fanned through them.

“Hey, you’re in here! And Tanya too!” I said, looking at a picture of a toddler-sized Tanya.

“Well, I’m only in there because I am Berit’s backup…you know, in case she meets with an accident or something. “Tanya is in there because she is Tanya,” she said with a shrug.

“So what do I expect and when?” I asked.

“First, when all the players have arrived there will be a welcoming event held by Senka and Tzao, as the remaining Elders. After that, Gault will convene the Conclave and the Elders will excuse themselves from the proceedings,” she said, pouring and sipping her newly warmed blood. I reflected that such a sight was totally normal for me now. She smiled at my thought.

“Wait! What do you mean the Elders excuse themselves?” I said, suddenly panicky.

“The Elders never attend the actual Conclave. They may, after a new Elder is selected, object or Challenge. Usually they’ve already removed any contenders that they don’t feel they can work with before the Conclave gets started.”

“By object and remove, do you mean kill?” I asked. She nodded.

“Kind of defeats the whole democratic process doesn’t it?” I asked.

“Chris, we’re in no way, shape or form a democracy. Strength rules, period,” she said, patiently, as if she were working with a particularly slow pupil, which technically I am.

“Stop being so hard on yourself. You have adapted to our world remarkably well in an incredibly short period of time. Most new vampires spend the first ten years well away from the rest of our society, cushioned and sheltered from the dangers of older Darkkin. You’ve been thrust right into the middle of it and in the most visible way possible.”

“That’s not making me feel better, Nika. I’m not a vampire, I smell, look and sound like a human, I’m bound to the most controversial vampire in the history of vampires and now you’re telling me that the two Darkkin who might prevent me from getting myself killed won’t be in the room when I am!”

She smiled. “That’s all pretty much true, Chris. I won’t lie to you…you’re right in the thick of it. But, don’t worry. I’m fairly certain that Senka and Tzao will take steps to make sure the Patrons know your importance to them,” she said, then we both turned to look at the door.

I had felt Tanya’s approach, and Nika likely ‘heard’ her thoughts.

Tanya popped through the door and glanced at our card party for a moment. Then she turned to me. “Off with the shirt!” she commanded.

Not even bothering with a snide comment, I pulled off my borrowed sweatshirt. The two ladies examined my naked torso for a moment.

“That’s amazing!” Nika said. “He has filled out already.”

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Tanya said. “But now he should probably sleep to speed up the recovery. Plus, Grandmother requests your attendance.” The last was directed at Nika, who nodded.

“Chris, study those cards when you can, alright, and we’ll work on it some more later.”

They left and I fell into bed and passed out.

Chapter 28

When I woke, I found five hours had slipped by. It was late in the night or early in the morning, depending on your point of view, I guess. I ate a huge breakfast, courtesy of Remy’s kitchen, then went looking for answers. Chet Akins was yawning and rubbing bleary eyes in his computer alcove.

“Hey Bud, how’s it going,” I said.

He hopped up and gave me a bro-hug, then collapsed back into his ergonomic computer chair.

“Dude, it’s freaking busy around here,” he said. “I’ve got dozens of groups of vamps coming into Citadel, each packing sophisticated electronics, each trying to get one over on our systems. I’m blocking viruses, frying bugs, scrambling signals and pulling lots and lots of file searches for the Elders. This Conclave thing is crazy!”

“Any problems?” I asked.

“Only every other minute!” he said. His long piano-player fingers darted over his keyboard and a video box popped up on his main monitor. “Check it.”

The security camera feed showed one group of vampires passing another in one of Citadel’s broad passageways, both parties tense. Suddenly the footage blurred and the parties were merged into chaos. Security vampires appeared and waded into the fray with Darkkin stun guns, which make standard Tasers look like toys. Liberal application of the zookeeper-grade prods sent vampires leaping to the walls and ceiling, finally leaving the two groups separate.

“Some of these groups really hate each other. I gotta flag each of these clips and send them to Lydia’s team. Some seem to get along pretty well and those are even more important for the Elders to know about,” he said. “Which reminds me. Senka asked me to make a file for you on the major players.”

He handed me an encrypted zip drive. “She wants you to get up to speed on the contenders for the Elder position. She also wants you to keep a low profile and stay out of sight as much as possible.”

“She’s afraid I’m gonna start some shit or something?”

“No…she’s afraid some visiting vamp will start some shit and you’ll finish it, creating a political nightmare. These foreign vamps are an arrogant bunch, think their shit doesn’t stink. We’re already having problems with assaults on the human staff. Arkady even assigned two of his guys to escort me around this stack of concrete.”

He pointed across the room and my eyes spotted two vampires that I knew worked for Arkady. They were talking to four others that had arrived in the room the same time I did. My own security shadow appeared to be back on the job.

“Chris, I gotta get back at this. I don’t get to go off duty till the sun comes up,” he apologized, pulling his chair back in front of the console. I waved goodbye and headed back toward my quarters. The four lounging Darkkin suddenly ‘felt’ the need to go in the same direction, two out in front of me and two behind. The hard plastic shape of the zip drive felt like it was burning a hole in my hand and my curiosity was riled up.

A strange vampire came around the corner ahead, quickly followed by two more. All in their third or fourth centuries, they wore matching dark Italian suits. My security shadows tightened noticeably at the sight of them. Another group of Darkkin appeared about ten feet behind them, also dressed in high fashion, three females and two males, followed finally by three more dark suited types. My ‘age’ sense was jumbled by their close proximity to each other but they seemed in line with the front bodyguard guys, that is, until the middle female became visible enough for me to get a good look at her.

She stood out from the others like she had sparklers in both hands and one on her head, my vampire sense telling me she was 860 years if a day. A mental picture of one of Nika’s cards popped into my head and I realized that I was about to run head first into one of the contenders for Elder… Mausya.

The two Citadel guards in front of me were undecided and nervous, so I whispered “Let’s give them room.” All five of us pushed up against the right side wall, letting the Russian Patron’s party continue by as if we weren’t there. That seemed to be what they expected us to do, the entire party giving off an incredibly arrogant vibe. The three body guards in the front didn’t even glance our way. The two males and one of the female assistants maintained haughty expressions, while whispering quietly to their boss. The other female, a tall blonde, looked at me curiously for just a moment till her eyes suddenly widened. Immediately she leaned down and whispered into Mausya’s ear. The older vampire stopped suddenly, her party freezing in place directly even with us. Cold dark eyes scanned me from toes to scalp, finally coming to rest on my own eyes.

“You’re the one. The human that started all this,” she said. From Nika’s reaction to her I had expected a voice like Crypt Keeper’s. Instead, it was a warm, a deeper than expected tone, completely without any accent of her native Russian.

“So I’ve been told,” I replied, immediately cursing my wiseass mouth.

The ‘aides’ and lackeys all froze for a moment as if expecting my sudden death. Mausya just stared at me, her eyes evaluating. The tension was broken by the clicking of nails on concrete further down the corridor. Awasos in wolf form came around the corner, stopped at the sight of our strange group and then plumped his butt down on the floor.

“Were!” one of the dark suited bodyguards said, pulling a Skorpion machine pistol from under his coat. Part of me identified it as the 9 millimeter model.

“He’s with me!” I said quickly. The guard ignored my comment bringing his gun on target, his finger not yet on the trigger, but indexed alongside it.

“Shall I kill it?” he asked with a heavy Russian accent.

Mausya was watching me, not the giant wolf, a cruel little smile on her lips. I was watching the guard’s finger, and as it started to curl toward the trigger, Grim surged to the surface, my right arm suddenly wreathed in mono-edge. One more millimeter of movement and the guard would lose his arm. The cascade of events that would likely follow flowed through my head, as Grim ‘war-gamed’ each scenario, catalogued each person’s position and plotted all their deaths. Part of me sighed internally. On site for less than twelve hours and I was already about to create a major incident. That same part noticed a slight tightening around Mausya’s eyes as her head tilted sideways.

“Nyet,” she said, in a no nonsense voice.

The guard froze. She spoke a few words in Russian then turned and started to walk away from us. Her whole party shifted into motion, machine smooth and just as sudden. The Skorpion disappeared back inside the black suit and within moments they were gone.

I looked at my security shadows and we all exchanged confused expressions. Awasos yawned.

***

“You shouldn’t be let out of the nursery!” Lydia said.

“He was going to shoot my wolf-bear, Lydia! What else was there to do?”

“Stay put where you belong!” she shouted. Lydia doesn’t shout much. She was really worked up. Something about almost precipitating a deadly incident with an Elder candidate seemed to have done it.

“Quiet you two, I can hardly hear this with all the yelling,” Tanya said from her position in front of the desk computer. She was running and re-running the video and audio footage from the corridor security cameras. My link told me she was intensely curious about something.

“What’s there to hear?” Lydia asked, shooting me a glare.

The little punky haired vampire had been run ragged handling all the details of the Conclave.

“If I heard what I thought, which with all the noise I can’t be sure, then I think she told the guard ‘No…it’s not your time to die.’ That’s pretty interesting since she doesn’t know Chris from Adam, yet she knew the guard would die if he tried to pull the trigger on ‘Sos,” Tanya said, reaching down to rub the furry wolf head lying next to her.

“Well, she must have heard stories,” Lydia said.

“Maybe, but almost to a person the Patrons have all dismissed Chris and myself as inconsequential. In fact, look here,” she directed, pointing at the screen. She hit a control and the video started. The look of dismissive contempt on the older vampire’s face was glaringly obvious, but it changed suddenly just before she commanded the guard to stop.

“What were you thinking just at that moment?” Tanya asked me.

“I thought he was going to shoot ‘Sos, so Grim slipped up to bat and was ready to take his arm off if he went for the trigger. Then the rest would react and Grim had multiple options lined up,” I said, ignoring Lydia’s scowl.

“Look at Mausya,” Tanya said, slowing the action to a crawl. “You are dirt to her…right up until the moment Grim appears..here!”

Her finger pointed to my image, tapping me at the moment my body language changed. I had never seen footage of myself flipping into Grim mode before. It was decidedly creepy. I went from a tense posture to a coiled posture in the blink of an eye. My facial expression went from concerned to serial killer, at least that’s how it looked to me. At that exact moment, when my killer alter-ego appeared, the old Russian vampire in front of me stiffened slightly, did that head tilt thing, then called off the guard and headed down the hall as if nothing had happened.

“Is she a mind reader?” I asked.

“No, at least we don’t think so. Nobody knows what other abilities Mausya has, but she has survived every confrontation, every plot against her and every assassination attempt. She has an uncanny ability to avoid problems,” Tanya said. “Your abilities are not secret, but the older vampires discount most of what they hear from the rank and file as hype. Yes, your posture and facial expressions change, but even if she realized that was your combat personality, how would she know to give credence to the threat?”

“Yeah, it’s like there was a professional bookie who suddenly changed the betting odds and she cancelled her bet,” Lydia said with a slight laugh.

“What was that?” Tanya whirled and looked at her tiny sister-in-fact.

“Oh, nothing. It just reminded me of some television episode we were watching the other night. The one where the horse trainer tried to get the odds higher on his horse so he could cash in big. The change in her expression was like the trainer’s when he saw the betting boards change.”

Tanya said nothing, just continued to stare at Lydia, but her eyes were unfocused as she followed some intense thought. My link told me that Lydia’s comment had triggered a ‘Eureka’ moment in my beautiful vampire’s scary smart brain.

“Let’s go to the library. I need to do some research,” she said suddenly.

Fifteen minutes later found us in the Citadel’s library, which housed all the old records and books of the New York Coven. Most information was digitalized and stored on the Citadel mainframe, but several hundred years of documents and printed volumes were carefully maintained in a climate controlled set of rooms. Thick Turkish rugs covered the concrete floors and the walls were hung with colorful tapestries that seemed to all run to a medieval theme.

“Where’s the Steven King stuff?” I asked Lydia, expecting a glare in return.

“He’s too tame,” she replied without missing a beat.

Tanya ignored our banter and headed to the computer terminal that acted as a card catalogue.

“Whatcha looking up?” I asked.

“Well, these documents are all new, only a couple of centuries old. The libraries in Europe and Asian date back thousands of years. But I know there used to be some handwritten histories that came over when this country was first settled. If I remember right, one of them documented known talents.”

“And you think Mausya’s is in there? Something to do with precognition or prophetic reading?” I guessed.

Lydia froze in mid-stride, then looked at me in wonder.

“Holy shit Gordon! How did you come up with that?” she asked.

“Well Tanya reacted to your horse racing comments and so it makes sense. Being able to see the near future would explain why she suddenly left and would be a hell of a good survival skill.”

Tanya shushed me, looking around to see if any other vampires were nearby. The library appeared disserted.

“Actually, I don’t think it’s precognition at all,” she said. “If it was, she would have known you would be in the hallway, instead, her aide had to point you out.”

“Yeah, and she would have known Awasos was coming around the corner,” Lydia added.

“Then what do you think it is?” I asked.

“I think Lydia was closest when she talked about horse racing and odds. I think Mausya reads probabilities for near term events,” Tanya said. “The probability of you staying out of her way and remaining submissive was extremely high…right up until her guard pointed his gun at ‘Sos. Then Grim popped up and the probability went off the chart that her whole day was about to be ruined.”

“Reading probabilities?” I asked, confused.

“We all do it to some degree or another. Think about it…you automatically assess the odds of getting hit by a car when you’re looking to cross the road, or the probability that the vendor will accept your low price offer when negotiating a deal,” Tanya explained. “I think she just has an extra edge, some other sense that feeds her updated information on each new situation.”

“Like when Grim prepared to lay waste to her entire group?” Lydia quipped.

“Exactly. She knew in an instant that all the odds had changed. She couldn’t really know how dangerous you are, or if she did, then she was incredibly stupid to brace you in the hallway and threaten your bear,” Tanya said.

“I don’t really like people to threaten my bear,” I said with a slight growl, thinking about the gun pointing at ‘Sos.

“Easy compadre, no bad vampires near your bear right now,” Lydia said slowly, like I was the village simpleton.

“Her expression was real; that look of haughty disdain. Then it changed in a split second and she stopped her guard and left. Anyway, that’s my theory. And this is the section where the book is supposed to be,” Tanya said, having lead us to a book shelf of very old looking books.

I didn’t trust myself to handle the ancient tomes so I let the two women move forward and scan the shelves. Tanya found the book she was looking for almost instantly, pulling the large leather clad volume from the shelf. Lydia was focused on a slim red book that had caught her eye.

“Three centuries ago a French vampire named Tristan D’Aramitz compiled everything he could find about known vampire Talents. He organized his book by groups of like talents, so I’ll start under what he calls ‘Prophetic powers’.”

I looked over her shoulder but the writing was all in French so I wandered over to the nearest tapestry instead. It showed knights on horses charging a line of infantry holding pikes.

Tanya closed the book, apparently having finished reading everything it offered on the subject. Her face was thoughtful and I could feel her thoughts humming with speculation. Lydia was deeply engrossed in the red book she still held.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Yeah, he mentions a Turkish vampire who could ‘weight the likely actions of others’.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, but it backs my theory, at least, to some degree,” she said. “Let’s get back to the room.”

“What did you find, Lyd? Some vampire porn? Fifty shades of red?” I asked.

She snapped the small book shut and gave me a smirk. “No it’s an education piece. How to raise a village idiot.”

“Then it’s probably dedicated to me,” I said, feeding her an easy set up.

She frowned and gave me a push toward the door. Luckily, I was Clinging with my feet or she would have thrown me across the room. It wasn’t like her to not take a verbal shot at me. I tried to see the cover of the book, but she tucked it under her arm and gave me a glare.

“Would you two come on? Maybe the book ought to be titled How to herd morons and I could read it,” Tanya said.

“Don’t you dare lump me in with Boy Wonder,” Lydia said, but took the hint and exited the library before Tanya could say anything else.

***

“Mom and I are going to the business center to get some work done. Neither of us is needed right now and I don’t like being around the Patrons,” Tanya told me a little later. Dawn was a couple of hours away so they wouldn’t get a whole lot done, but Galina and Tanya were so sharp that even a little for them was a lot.

“I’m gonna sack out for a while,” I replied. “Then I think I’ll get out of Citadel for a while. Maybe catch a movie.”

Chapter 29

The latest Marvel comic book-turned-movie was better than I thought it would be the action intense and the effects world class.

“I like the assassin chick,” Benson commented to our odd group as we left the theatre and started down West 54th street. My decision to go to the movies had been, oddly enough, matched by the better part of the daytime security group – right down to the choice of movie. Mr. Deckert had said something about Arkady wanting most of the human staff out of Citadel while so many older vampires were around. The fact that the squad of ex-special forces type had ‘felt’ like going with me to see an action flick would have seemed odd, but I knew my position as Tanya’s Chosen sort of required Arkady to provide me with security, despite my abilities.

Deckert snorted at Benson’s comment about the beautiful, curvy character in the movie. “You want assassin chicks then just look at Citadel – the place is currently crawling with them.”

“Yeah but they’re all cold blooded. Who wants to snuggle with that? The one in the movie has warm skin,” the burly ex-army soldier said. The others stiffened and he realized what he said.

“Oops, my bad. Sorry Chris, I wasn’t talking about Lady T,” he apologized.

“No problem. I actually know what you mean, but I think it’s the reptilian stares that get me. The older the vampire the less they act human. It’s really creepy,” I said.

“You know you might have hit it on the head,” Hedges agreed, slugging Benson on the shoulder.

“Tanya acts just like a human…for the most part,” he finished.

“I wish I had a suit of powered armor like the one in the movie,” Stevens said in an obvious attempt to change the topic.

“They can’t be that far off,” I said. “Maybe not the flying part, but powered armor has been a concept for decades. You just know that DARPA or some other agency is looking into it.”

“Be useful against vamps and weres,” Stevens said.

“Would it Chris?” Deckert asked. The others all perked up, interested in my answer.

“Well it would have to help, at least against the younger ones. I’m not sure how much good it would do against the older ones – they’re just too fast,” I said.

“Hosokowa’s pretty fast huh?” Hedges asked.

“Like freaking greased lightning,” I muttered, then looked up. “You guys all heard about that huh?”

“Are you kidding? Arkady was first shocked almost speechless then couldn’t stop crowing about the Young Queen’s Chosen handing the Duelist his first loss,” Benson said in a rush.

“I’m not sure I’d call it a loss. I got a few good shots in though.”

“Yeah, more of a draw, although he was wounded and you were just hungry,” Deckert commented.

“Speaking of hungry, let’s grab a bite to eat….my treat,” I said, pointing to an Irish pub looking place just across 54th street from where we were walking. The daytime crew might not have my metabolism, but they were all big, athletic guys and the thought of food with the possibility of beer on the side had their immediate attention.

Being as it was early afternoon during the workweek the place wasn’t too crowded. The pretty Irish hostess found us a table, got us seated and handed out menus in short order. She did it all while skillfully handling the automatic banter that a bunch of high testosterone types get when around attractive women.

“I think she’s seen through your blarney Stevens,” Deckert said with a grin.

“Hell, I’ve barely gotten started,” Stevens replied.

Our waiter appeared, asking about drinks, and Deckert agreed that his crew could handle a round of Guinness. I’m not sure that they were on official duty anyway, but his sense of professionalism demanded that they stay sober. Me, I could drink a keg of the stuff and not get drunk, the alcohol burning up way too fast.

“Dude, I’m guessing the hostess is seeing someone?” Stevens asked, trying for some field intell.

“Yeah – me,” the waiter answered as he headed toward the bar to get our drinks.

“Crash and burn,” Benson commented without looking up from his menu.

“Nah, that’s almost ideal,” Stevens replied, looking unconcerned as he waved at the hostess who had glanced our way.

“How so? Hedges asked.

“Workplace romances almost always fall apart and she’ll need consolation,” Stevens said with a sly grin. “Till then I’ll just have to find something else to occupy my time,” he said as a mixed group of twenty-somethings were shown to the table across from ours, his eyes locked on two very attractive girls in stylish clothes. The hostess noticed him staring at them and just shook her head. I figured Stevens wasn’t the first player to cross her path.

I excused myself and headed to the bathroom to take a leak. Business complete I paused just outside the restrooms to look over the restaurant. It was long and narrow, with a built in, leather clad bench against one wall that ran parallel to the tables, and the long polished bar on the other wall. I heard the lady’s room door open behind me, my senses automatically locked on to a young female exiting the restroom. Without turning to look, I slid to one side to let her go by.
“Sorry, just looking the place over,” I said, in explanation. Green eyes glanced at me, then did a startled double-take at the sight of my eyes.

“First time here?” she asked after finding her voice.

“Yup, how’s the food?”

“The fish and chips are very authentic and the chicken pot pie is really good,” she answered before brushing brown hair behind one ear and heading to the table of young professionals where Stevens was hitting on two of her friends.

I sat down just before the waiter plunked my pint of Guinness at my spot. He broke out his order pad and started with the formidable Mr. Deckert, who ordered three appetizers for the table and a sea scallop entrée for himself. When it came my turn, I ordered both the fish and chips and the chicken pot pie. The waiter blinked a few times at my double order but no one else at the table batted an eye.

The Guinness was tasty and I relaxed a bit, listening to the guys debate the powers of the super heroes in the movie while simultaneously sniping comments at Stevens about the girls he was trying to pick up. The movie and the restaurant were a slice of normalcy after three months Roving and the last few days of hyper intense vampire drama. The Darkkin politics were only going to get worse in the near future and I sensed real concern from my mate.

“Who do you favor in the Elder race,” Deckert asked quietly. Every conversation at our table stopped as the attention turned to my answer.

“You’ve been a part of that world longer than I have. I don’t know that I have any great insights,” I said, noticing that our suddenly quiet table had caught the attention of at least a few of our neighbors’ one table over.

Deckert snorted. “Son, your place in that world was set in motion before you were born…hell, before your mother was born! In case it’s missed your attention, most of Citadel rotates around your girl and to a greater degree than you know—you!”

At some level or another I understood what he was saying, but it wasn’t a concept I was comfortable with and not anything I took for granted.

“I don’t know much about any of them, and the only one I’ve crossed paths with was Mausya, but I have a feeling she might be the lead horse in that race,” I said, staring into my beer.

“Be real careful around her, hell, around all of them, but her in particular,” I cautioned the table, then noticed that Stevens’ two targets of opportunity were both watching our byplay as was the pretty green-eyed girl I had met by the restrooms.

The others noticed me noticing the attention from the other table and being special ops types they immediately changed behavior to cover the seriousness. A change of topic was in order and I had been meaning to ask Deckert a question.

“How’s your daughter?” I asked.

He looked down at his beer, swirling the rich, dark liquid around. “The test results came back as leukemia,” he said, his voice bleak.

“That’s what Dr. Singh thought. Listen, Tanya told him to use however much of her blood or even mine as he thought necessary to treat it,” I said, remembering a recent conversation. I had been recovering from my bout with Hokosawa when the good Doctor had updated my vampire on the health of her human security chief’s ten-year old daughter.

Deckert froze at my words, then looked slowly back up at me. All pretense of pretending to hold normal conversations halted at our table. “She said that?”

“Yeah, and Singh is certain that will be the end of that. He said that regular vampire blood has a great track record for curing leukemia and Tanya’s ought to pretty much devastate it. He’s intrigued by the idea of using mine, but whichever he uses the disease is pretty much gonna be history.”

His eyes held an intense light in them as he processed my words. Deckert doesn’t normally show much emotion, but he fairly vibrated with it at the moment.

“I thought that Tanya’s blood was off limits to everyone but you?” Benson asked, flicking his eyes at his boss then back to me.

“It goes to whoever she decides it goes to. She’s decided that Brianne needs to grow up and provide her father with grandchildren to train in the arts of mayhem,” I said as lightly as possible.

“Do you know..er..when?” Deckert asked, quietly.

“Well, Doc Singh already has a vial of each of our blood so I would guess the very next time he visits her,” I said.

“Tonight – he’s set to check up on her tonight,” Deckert said, his voice sounding a little odd.

The table was quiet for a moment, then one of the girls Stevens had been talking to leaned back in her chair and whispered in his ear.

“Ah we’ve been invited to a party…some new artist opening or something,” Stevens said, faltering.

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged. “You guys should check it out. I gotta get back to the big C, see what trouble I can get into.”

“Artist parties aren’t your thing?” Hedges asked.

“Parties aren’t my thing. I..ah, don’t go to parties, pretty much as rule. Never been to an artist party,” I said.

“But you’ve been to a party right?” Hedges asked.

“Sure, I go to Toni’s birthday parties every year and back when I was with the Squad I went to some after work parties.”

“I ain’t talking no kids party. I’m talking about adult, alcohol served, loud music, women everywhere parties,” he clarified.

“Maybe one or two during college, but they’ve never been a good idea for me. Getting drunk was an invitation to die, loud music hurt my ears and getting close to girls was an invitation for them to die.”

“You should check this one out,” Benson said.

“Alcohol doesn’t affect me anymore, loud music really hurts my ears now, and I’ve got Tanya,” I said with a shrug.

“Dude, it’s kind of sad that you never went to parties. If you went now, the chicks would be all over you!” Stevens said.

“Didn’t you hear him? He’s got Tanya!” Deckert said to Stevens who had always been real unclear on the concept of monogamy.

The waiter showed up with a tray load of food and the table went quiet as everyone dug in.

***

Citadel was swarming with activity when we got back.

“What’s going on?” I asked the security vampires at the door.

“One of our techs got bit. Senka is pissed off like I’ve never seen her. They want you there like yesterday,” he replied, waving to another of Arkady’s guys to give me a ride in a golf cart.

“Who got bit?” I asked, a hollow feeling in my stomach.

He didn’t answer till I was in the cart and it had started forward. “Your buddy…Chet!”

The golf cart shot forward, careening down the long hallways at breakneck speed, taking me away before I could fully process what he had said.

“Is he alive?” I asked my driver, who was sitting as far over on his side of the seat as he could get from me.

“I think so, but I don’t know any other details,” he said, nervously.

I shut up and let him drive, worrying about my friend, while the three minute drive seemed to take hours.

Chapter 30

The security guy dropped me off at a dead end hallway. Four of Senka’s Guardian-trained vampires in full armor and weapons were standing guard at the entrance to the little side passage.

One of them pointed behind him without saying a word or changing expression, so I kept my mouth shut and walked down the short corridor to the corner where it doglegged right and ended.

Senka, her giant seven-foot bodyguard, Ondrej, Tanya and a visibly sleepy looking Lydia were studying the empty end of the hall. A plastic ballpoint pen and a small puddle of blood were the only sign that something had happened here.

All four turned to look at me and I started to ask what had happened when the vision hit.

I have two types of visions; one that is almost precognitive – always showing an impending demon attack and the other is what I think of as a forensic vision – laying out a series of images that almost always depict a recent supernatural attack of some type.

This vision was the forensic kind and Tanya picked up enough through our link to snatch a clipboard and pen from an attending vampire and hand them both to me.

“Is he alive?” I asked while my right hand sketched out the first of three scenes.

“Chester is alive and healing,” Senka said, in a voice of arctic cold. “Singh is attending and assures me that he will survive, especially after my Gift to him.”

The older vampires attached much meaning when one of them donated a small dose of their own blood to heal a human or younger vampire. The Gift of blood was a sign of how highly an older vampire valued the recipient.

I looked around the hall while my right hand continued sketching on its own. There were no security cameras in this part of the hallway, so the attack hadn’t been recorded.

“Any video from the main hall?” I asked.

“Two, wearing hooded shirts – no faces,” the giant Ondrej rumbled.

“Wait – didn’t Arkady assign a couple of guys to watch over Chet?” I asked, still drawing.

“We found them staked in a supply closet,” Lydia answered.

“Dead?” I asked.

“No, just a pointy piece of wood through the heart. They’re healing now,” Tanya explained.

Staking a vampire will render it unconscious and vulnerable, but you pretty much have to either rip the heart out or decapitate it to kill it.

I looked down at the clipboard as the others crowded behind me to look over my shoulder. Three separate pictures were appearing under the blurring movement of my pen. The first showed Chet being shoved against the wall by two vampires in dark hoodies, his face terrified. The second scene showed one vampire’s face as he appeared to question Chet, the second Darkkin still hidden. The third showed the questioner biting Chet’s throat while the previously hidden one turned to look back at the main corridor, exposing his full face.

“This is accurate?” Senka asked, her cultured voice reflecting disbelief.

“Extremely,” Tanya answered, carefully studying the pictures as my hand finished its work and stopped moving.

“I think it’s an offshoot of the visions I have gotten my whole life – the ones that show me demon attacks. These only occur with recent supernatural attacks and only if the scene of the crime is fairly…fresh,” I explained. “I can’t force the demonic ones but I have some ability to push these CSI type sketches.”

Senka studied the sketch then turned to Ondrej. “I want these two – now! See that all our people get copies of this.”

Lydia leaned over the Elder’s shoulder and snapped a picture of the sketch with her iPhone, then typed for a rapid second.

“Done! Every member of your line now has this sketch,” the little vamp said. My iPhone buzzed in my pocket as did Tanya’s and Ondrej’s. The giant looked from his the photo on his phone to the little vampire and snorted. He started to comment and then his hand vibrated as his phone buzzed again.
“Arkady has them under observation,” he reported in heavily accented English.

Senka looked from him to Lydia and then to Tanya and me, shook her head once then smiled a cold, grim smile. “Have them observed to see who they interact with for the next two hours, then grab them. The Conclave convenes in three hours. I want to remind the participants of what it means to be an Elder – especially an Elder who has people as talented as I do.”

***

Citadel had been built with every contingency in mind including an auditorium that could seat a thousand people. It was close to half-full when Tanya, Lydia, Nika and I entered along with a large number of Senka’s people, many that I didn’t know.

We were all dressed up, males in suits and the ladies in formal dresses. Tanya’s dress was a sapphire blue to match her eyes and her coal black hair was braided and styled around her head. She was beautiful, but I noticed that the knee length dress wouldn’t hinder movement and the close styled hair left nothing to grab onto. She picked up on my thoughts and winked at me.

“A girl’s gotta be prepared,” she said with a shrug.

“And still make it look great!” Nika said. “Now damp down your shields Chris. There are other mind readers here.”

“Yes Mother,” I said.

“Sister,” Galina said, gliding up behind us. “I’m the only Mother.”

A dark haired, hazel-eyed older version of Tanya, she was jealous of her position as the only vampire to ever give birth to another.

“Hi mother,” Tanya said, reaching over and squeezing her hand.

“Dear one,” Galina said. ‘Chris. Ladies,” she directed at myself then Lydia and Nika. She was unfailingly polite to me – it scared me a little.

Our group moved slowly into the room, entering the main floor through an arch that was big enough to let the five of us walk abreast. It reminded me of entering a football stadium through the teams’ corridor, except for the red velvet carpet and the ornate marble floor. Ahead the room opened to a giant circle with a series of raised judge’s benches on the lowest tier. Behind each desk-like bench, which appeared to be constructed of black basalt, a small arc of seats climbed for thirty or so rows. There appeared, by my quick count, to be about twenty of the raised judge-type benches, with vampires seated in the sections behind only about thirteen of them. The front of each bench had a Roman number carved from ornate white marble.

Ahead of us, a tall, elegant blonde vampire wearing a full length evening gown was checking names off a list. With her hair up in a sophisticated arraignment she wouldn’t have looked out of place in an eighteenth century Royal Ball…except for the iPad she was using instead of paper.

The group in front of us was checked off and directed to one of the arcs behind bench number four. We moved up and waited for the blonde to raise her head, which she did with a look of bored disdain. She looked us over with one eyebrow raised, then appeared to recognize Galina, Tanya and Nika.

“Atta,” Galina greeted her reservedly.

“Ah, the young mother and her….brood,” the blonde answered with an even frostier tone. She glanced back at her list and started checking off names as she looked at each of us. When her cold blue eyes reached me she frowned.

“A human Galina? Isn’t that in bad taste..even for this country?” she asked with a sniff.

Tanya tensed beside me and I could feel her mood darken instantly.

Galina, however, laughed. It was a sincere, delighted laugh. “Hah, an easy mistake to make, Atta – for someone who has been, shall we say, away from society,” she said.

The blonde frowned and tensed slightly. My vampire sense told me she was a little over six hundred years of age and I recognized her face from the deck of Significants. Atta was the Registrar of the Conclave and hailed from somewhere in Russia or thereabouts.

“My son-in-law may appear to you as human, but he is far removed from that species. Don’t be fooled by the delicious scent of his blood, Atta dear. After all, I’m sure there are some humans who find you similarly appealing,” Galina said, her voice a cool hiss.

The older vampire’s eyes narrowed at the insults, but her eyes flicked past Tanya to reexamine me. Her avoidance of my vampire’s gaze appeared nonchalant, but I could read her awareness of the danger standing next to me.

She gave the slightest of shrugs. “You’re all in section ten,” she said, handing us each a slip of paper with a section number and seat number. Hmmm, assigned seating, interesting.

Sections nine and ten were directly ahead of us at the center of the arc formed by the circular arena. The vampires in section nine were all of Asian descent so I felt pretty safe in assuming that dais number nine would seat Tzao and number ten was reserved for Senka. Armed guardians from both Senka and Tzao’s personal teams lined the upper level completely encircling the room, giving them clear fields of fire into all the sections. Arkady had a security checkpoint just outside the auditorium that all of the entering vampires had to go through. They had been thorough with us but the vampire supervisor had just sighed when I went through, recognizing that my most potent weapons are built in.

We found our seats, four rows from the bottom. Some of the older vampires in Senka’s section were seated below us and Galina knew them all, although I only recognized one or two. Galina exchanged greetings with them, most also greeting Tanya. I received more than my share of stares, some with nods, most just curious.

“That’s Lison and her lackeys,” Nika said, leaning forward and whispering.

I followed her gaze to the Registrar’s check-in point where Atta was smiling and greeting an elegantly gowned black-haired vampiress. Lison was very slender and pale, her black hair cut short in a modern style, looking every inch like a French fashion model.

A male vampire waited behind Lison’s party, for the most part patiently, but I spotted a couple of micro flashes of impatience. He had a long hawkish nose, his dark eyes hooded. His skin had most likely been olive toned prior to becoming a vampire. I applauded his aplomb as I would have been thoroughly put out by the fawning and ass kissing that the Registrar was displaying.

“That one is Gultekin – from Turkey. He represents most of Northern Africa,” Nika explained.

“I notice a lack of African and Middle Eastern vampires,” I said.

“There aren’t many, at least above the age of a hundred. There was a problem there last century and the older ones didn’t do well,” Nika said.

“Problem?” I asked.

“They disobeyed the Elders,” Tanya said. “They were Purged.”

Gultekin had a small party – only ten other vampires with him, all quite young. When he made it past the Registrar, his group headed toward dais number three. Lison was placed at number twelve. There appeared to be a ranking system in place – the more important vampires placed closer to the Elders’ sections. Gultekin did not appear to rank high in the hierarchy.

“Tavian and Elisabeta are here,” Lydia announced.

“And there’s Frimunt coming in with Gault and Berit,” Nika added.

Tavian and Elisabeta were striking even among vampires. Much of that could be laid at Elisabeta’s shocking blood-red hair, but they exuded charisma as they charmed their fellow Darkkin in line. The pair stayed close to one another, but it appeared to be an unconscious habit, something they weren’t even aware of. I realized that Tanya and I were pressed against each other at hip, thigh and shoulder and there was plenty of room on the bench. I was seated on the end of the row nearest to section nine, then Tanya, Nika and Lydia. Galina was in the row just in front of her daughter.

Glancing back up at the Registrar’s check-in I saw that Tavian and his Chosen had passed through and were headed to section seven. When my gaze followed them, I noticed that most of the rising seats around us were filling rapidly. Across the aisle from me a very attractive Asian vampiress was settling into her seat and she flashed me a bright smile before turning forward. Several of her fellows also made eye contact with me and smiled while nodding hello. It was odd. I didn’t know very many Darkkin from Tzao’s contingent, just one or two of her security people. Yet here was at least a dozen unknown vampires giving me a friendly vibe. Unheard of.

“You are seated on the end for a reason,” Tanya said very softly. I could tell she had picked up on my bewilderment.

“To put me closer to Elder Tzao’s group?” I guessed.

“Exactly. You are my Chosen and I belong here, but Senka is well aware of the pride Tzao has displayed at your heritage.”

“That’s very diplomatic of her,” I opined.

Tanya laughed. “Don’t you think Tzao’s people might be aware of who you are as well?”

“I guess. Not sure I’m ever going to be comfortable with attention,” I said.

“Then you will spend a vast amount of time being uncomfortable Christian Anthony Gordon,” she replied then gave me a quick kiss.

When I managed to break away from her cobalt blue gaze I found myself more uncomfortable as we were the center of many a fascinated gaze from vampires all around the room. Most were unknowns, the rank and file of each Patrons vampire ‘posse’. I look human, radiate much greater body heat than a vampire and smell like dinner. Every other being in the room was a straight up vampire so my standing out wasn’t altogether odd. But several of the faces watching Tanya and I gave me a cold shiver. Lison met my eyes for a moment before greeting a new arrival. Elisabeta’s cold stare looked us over while Tavian talked to Frimunt and Gault. I’m pretty sure that she didn’t move or say anything, but suddenly Tavian looked up and matched his mate’s predatory stare. Frimunt turned to another vampire but Gault glanced our way, following the direction that Tavian and Elisabeta were looking. Then their heads swiveled to the doorway as a new entrant arrived.

Mausya made her grand entrance at the head of a long swarm of Darkkin. Poised and elegant she carried herself as gracefully as any vampire I had ever seen. I glanced back at the group who had been watching me in time to see a look of hate flash across Frimunt’s face. Gault didn’t appear to have the same feeling toward Mausya, instead he looked slightly fascinated.

Atta, as Registrar, was theoretically supposed to be impartial to the candidates, but then again the US media is supposed to be impartial in politics as well, and look how that has worked out. Atta kissed ass like a room full of White House correspondents with the President. The upshot was Mausya being directed to dais number eleven.

Her oversized group filled up their seats rapidly, again sitting oldest lowest to youngest up high. Two-thirds of the way up the rows I noticed another face turned in my direction. Illarion, Tanya’s uncle by blood was staring icicles in my direction. I smiled back at him and made a little pistol shooting motion with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. He stared a moment longer then turned away, face as stiff as a wax dummy.

Tanya straightened beside me and I looked back at the entrance. The queue to enter had vanished, all the vampires now seated. The Registrar checked her iPad then turned to the room.

“Rise for our Elders, our most Honored Tzao, Treasure of the Middle Kingdom and Honored Senka, Light of the Bulgarion Empire,” she intoned, speaking loudly enough to drown out all the private conversations under way. All eyes looked at the entrance as Senka and Tzao entered side-by-side, holding hands of all things. Senka was dressed in a midnight blue floor length gown that perfectly complemented her blonde hair and dark eyes. Tzao wore a silk kimono of white with yellow flowers, perhaps Irises.

Staring straight ahead, the two Elders floated across the room followed by Ondrej and Hosokawa. Upon reaching their dais, the two vampire leaders stepped up to their respective seats and stood in front of the heavy throne-like chairs.

The two body guards took up a position to the left of the raised seats. That put Hosokawa right at the bottom of the stairs next to my seat, between dais nine and ten. As he positioned himself he glanced up and spotted me. Grim rose to the surface beneath my skin, twitching, ready to react. Power pooled in my right hand without my conscious thought.

Hosokawa drew himself up straight, stared directly in my eyes and – bowed. It wasn’t a slight lean at the waist thing, but a full-fledged martial arts type, eyes down, bow.

I froze, completely caught off guard.

“Bow back you idiot!” Lydia hissed at me, her voice almost inaudible.

I stood and awkwardly bowed back, doing my best dojo/sensei bow.

He straightened and turned smoothly to face forward as I hurriedly sat back down. Every eye in the arena was on me, every vampire having seen the Duelist’s action.

Tzao’s face reflected nothing as she turned forward, but Senka had a slight gleam in her eye as she faced the room and began to speak.

Chapter 31

“Welcome my fellow Darkkin. Welcome to the Conclave of the Coven,” she began. “Called by the Patrons, this will be the thirty-seventh occasion when we have gathered to select a new Elder to help bring calm and control to our world. Thirty-seven moments in history since the savage times of the Anarchy have Darkkin come together and picked strong leaders to guide our race with grace and direction.

The centuries of the Anarchy saw the full extent of our unbridled appetites and emotions, but not our wisdom and intelligence. Little better than animals…that’s how we existed. But strong leaders emerged and fought to select an even stronger triumvirate of Darkkin to bring order to chaos, reason to insanity, and direction to our people.

Now, once again, we are called on to select a new leader, as one of ours has fallen. Venerable Fedor, he of iron will and iron hand, has left us behind, preceding us into the Dark. He will not be easily replaced – no, in fact, our next Elder will have a long row to hoe and the shoes of a giant to fill. But while he will be missed, Fedor will serve in death as he did in life, as the specifics of his passing have much to teach us. About our fast changing world and our place in it.

Therefore, as tradition dictates, the Conclave will first explore the details of Fedor’s final death to best extract the lessons he left us to learn. Then our Conclave of Patrons will sift and filter, test and retest those among them who seek a higher role. Finally, they will vote and re-vote until they agree on which of these candidates will best serve our needs.

Thirty-six times before has this happened, but this Conclave will be at least as important as any before, including the first. You see my fellow Darkkin, your Elders, including fallen Fedor, have known for some time that we stand on the cusp of a new era. Our human brethren, whom we have nurtured and guided over the centuries, have grown and expanded the sciences and world of technology as never before. And our own scholars have worked right alongside them, helping bring forth these new understandings and insights. The last one hundred years has seen an exponential explosion of growth in physics, chemistry, astronomy, the biological sciences and technology itself. From the forges of the blacksmith our flock has arrived at the new forges of Nano science, computer science, quantum physics and genetic engineering. The future is difficult to see, increasingly hard to predict with each new breakthrough. So we must be more than ready. We can’t just be positioned to survive, but to thrive. To ride this wave of knowledge into our future. But should we not prepare, should we fail to plan – than we may face dangers we have never known. Weapons far beyond silver, wood and fire. Enemies that can match and exceed our abilities and strengths, enemies that fear and hate us. That is the challenge our next Elder will face, a challenge that Honored Tzao and I identified decades ago. One that she and I have planned for in exhausting detail.

Fedor too saw these changes coming. He sought a different path, one he felt was better for our people. Long did we debate the directions we each took, not knowing which was best. That, my fellow Darkkin, may well be the final truth that Fedor bestows us. For in the manner of his passing the kernels of knowledge may lay scattered about for us to find.

You see, there are two ways to look at these changes: you can either fear them or you can embrace them. Fighting the change is like fighting the transformation into vampire…it doesn’t work. In fact it can kill you. But accepting new ways, new ideas,…new beings, all can make us stronger just as the Turn made you stronger as Darkkin.

Tzao and I have chosen this path, the one that gives our people the best of the new world. Some of you fight that. Some will see only danger and threat where we see opportunity. I promise you that hiding from these changes is futile and leaves the best of these new resources available to our enemies.

So I challenge the Patrons to select one among them who can embrace change and help guide us into this new reality. I challenge them to put aside their fear and gather their courage.

Now is the time – let the Conclave begin!”

Every vampire in the stomped their right foot once, in unison, while shouting a guttural ‘ASSA!”.

I had been prepared for clapping, not this. Lydia, Nika, Galina and Tanya all stomped and shouted with the others. I was the only one in the room who didn’t.

That one unified action, that one group response sank home how completely out of place I was. The feeling had been there all along, the understanding that I stood outside of the group. In Senka’s message I wasn’t part of them, I was the new thing...the new idea…the new being.

It was like being in a new church and not knowing the right time to say ‘amen’, but worse. Every vampire around me was aware of my lack of understanding…my failure to belong.

Tanya gave me an apologetic glance, maybe for not explaining the group response beforehand, but it just made me realize how far out of my element I really was.

Lydia says I belong with the Coven, by right of being Chosen, but she is wrong. I didn’t really fit in, no matter how much I tried to tell myself that I did. I was in the middle of a room full of blood sucking vampires every one of which was intensely aware of my heartbeat, my warmth, my blood scent.

Suddenly dizzy as if my seat had suddenly spun in place fifty times like the tilt-a-whirl at the county fair.

My grandfather had once taken me on a trip into Canada, north of Montreal. We had stopped at a small restaurant for dinner and he had excused himself to go to the men’s room. Left alone at the table, I had suddenly become aware that every conversation in the room was in French. I was ten at the time and while it wasn’t my first trip into the Quebec province, it was the first time I had realized just how much different the world became a few miles over the border from my home.

This was like that time only magnified exponentially.

I won’t sit here and tell you it was the first time I had wondered at the strangeness of the supernatural world I had found myself thrust into over two years ago when I met Tanya. There had been plenty of moments of introspection and questioning. But life had progressed at a speed of motion that smoothed those specks of uncertainty over. Now, in this moment, it was as if I had stopped my headlong rush and all those thoughts and emotions had come rushing up behind me, catching up and slamming home, a twenty car pileup on the interstate of my brain.

Tanya froze, then turned in place to look at me, even as Senka spoke the words that turned over the Conclave to Gault and his fellow Patrons. I couldn’t meet her gaze, too overwhelmed by the feeling of culture shock…hell…species shock.

Then we were standing and moving, dismissed from the amphitheater along with the rank and file Darkkin. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she could feel my emotions on our personal wi-fi connection. We shuffled along, moving to the exit, but now I was hypersensitive to the larger than usual space around me, the odd sideways glances, the subtle sniffs of air to gather my scent. Hundreds of personal conversations swirled around us, but we each stayed silent.

“Well, that was….short!” Lydia said, brightly. “Here I thought it would take hours and hours.”

Nika murmured an agreement, but Lydia was suddenly studying Tanya and me, her personal radar sniffing out a situation.

“What’s up?” she asked, looking back and forth between us. I didn’t answer, keeping my gaze on an imaginary spot on the floor ten feet in front of us.

“He is feeling out of place,” Tanya said quietly.

Lydia started to make a comment, most likely wiseass in nature, but slammed her mouth shut at the last moment. I could see her shoot a look at my vampire from my peripheral vision, but couldn’t see Tanya’s response. Nika was watching me as well, but I had my anti-mind reading shield in place. The trip back to our rooms was very quiet.

I veered off toward the kitchen just before we got to our quarters, claiming hunger. I don’t think anyone believed me, but I needed time alone and they needed time to talk – probably about me.

The thing is whenever I’ve been with Lydia, Nika, Tanya and a few others, I haven’t felt odd. Well odder. Let’s face it, I’ve been odd my whole life. But what I mean is that I never really felt out of place. I was just hanging out with three beautiful girls who happened to drink blood. They didn’t act too much different from other girls I had observed.

But when I was in a large crowd of vampires, particularly old ones, the alien nature of their society would suddenly press on me. Sitting in the amphitheater with several hundred very old vampires had struck me like lightning. What was I doing here? I didn’t belong underground with a race of bloodsuckers. I belonged above ground – actually, I belonged above ground and out of the Big Apple. I should be somewhere with forests and fields, lakes and streams.

The kitchen was empty, which was a relief. The industrial fridge yielded a block of sharp cheddar and a lump of roast beef. I made toasted sandwiches and washed it all down with full fat milk while I pondered my life.

Claws clicked on the floor, but some deep seated part of me instantly identified the sound as belonging to a young were bear-wolf. Awasos padded into the kitchen in wolf form looking hopefully at the chunk of beef.

“Ah, I wondered if you would track me down, fuzz face. Here, have a slab,” I greeted my furry friend, ruffling his neck fur. Looking him over I realized he was getting bigger.

“Still just a growing wolf-bear aren’t ya pal?”

He finished his chunk of beef, snuffled my face then looked pointedly at the hunk on the butcher block.

I laughed and cut him another piece. I might be out of place but I was certain that I belonged with Tanya and my furry pal.

Feeling marginally better, the two of us headed back to the rooms. We didn’t make it.

A pair of Arkady’s security guys found me in the hall. “Chosen, the Conclave has…requested your attendance,” one of them said. By his momentary hesitation I knew he had been about to say ‘ordered’ but changed it at the last moment. Arkady’s guys hold me, or at least my abilities, in some respect. With a sigh, I followed them back to the amphitheater, Awasos at my side.

Chapter 32

A pair of guards that I didn’t know held me up at the entrance to the Conclave, telling me the Patrons would call for me when they were ready. Apparently ready was an hour and a half later, when the doors opened and a visibly weary Arkady came out. He looked like he’d been thoroughly wrung out by the Conclave’s questioning. Spotting me as he came out, he nodded then swung back around. “Try to keep your temper Chosen,” he said, till one of the unknown guards told him to keep quiet and the other told me the Conclave was ready for me.

That little exchange said a lot. Arkady headed up the Citadel’s security, so these guards wouldn’t be any of his to talk to him that way. Must have been brought in by either the Elders or the Patrons. His comment to keep my temper was also telling. I could assume that he’d been questioned about the events of Fedor’s death as he had been assistant security chief at that time and would have detailed memories of the cleanup of Fedor, Anton, and Vadim.

All of this ran through my head as I was led into the big room by one of the guards. I had just gotten to wondering why my temper was about to be tested, when I arrived in the center of the room, facing all of the Patrons on their raised dais’s.

Gault had taken Senka’s spot at number ten and Atta had moved into the seat that Tzao had vacated. Hosokawa stood at the midway point between the two, feet spread in parade rest, a pair of sword hilts poking above his shoulder. Eleven pairs of eyes studied me, while Gault kept his eyes on his desk, reading through notes. Up high on my right side, on the walkway above the highest row of seats, was a door. Something was behind that door that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. The feeling was muted and dim.

Finally Gault spoke. “You are called Christian Gordon?”

“Yes,” I answered. He studied me with cold gray eyes for a moment before looking back down at his paperwork.

“You claim to be the Chosen of Tatiana Demidova?”

Interesting choice of words, that.

“Yes,” I said.

“You also claim to have witnessed Elder Fedor’s death?”

“Yes.”

He looked up and watched me for a moment. “Explain what happened,” he ordered.

“He pissed off a god and was crushed like tooth paste,” I said. Probably not the smoothest answer, but despite Arkady’s warning I was already losing patience with the Conclave. More than a dozen very old vampires stared at me coldly.

“You know it was a god how?” Lison asked suddenly.

I almost said that an Angel had told me the bear was a god, but then remembered some advice an assistant DA had once given me about testimony. ‘Keep your answers short and don’t embellish. Don’t give the questioner more information than you have to.’

This felt like a trial or court of inquiry so I needed to watch my tongue.

“Members of the Special Services Squad felt it fit the profile of an elder god. It had the ability to appear and disappear at will and was easily able to crush an Elder vampire into true death.”

“The word of a human so-called expert was what you have to go by that it was a god?” Frimunt asked.

I actually had a lot more than that, but their hostile attitude killed any inclination to help them understand the details. They would ask and I would answer and let them believe or disbelieve me either way.

“Yes,” I answered, getting a frown from Atta.

“Why?” asked red-haired Elisabeta. “Why did the ‘god’ kill Fedor?”

“He never said, but I inferred that he objected to Fedor’s intention to kill me.”

“And what made you so special in the eyes of this so-called god?” Gault asked.

I didn’t answer immediately, staring back while I thought about my answer. Apparently that was too slow.

“You will answer the Prolocuter’s questions without hesitation!” Mausya said.

I eyed her for a minute while I shoved Grim back down. Her head tilted slightly as I wrestled with my dark half.

“I freed him from slavery,” I finally answered.

“And who was able to enslave a god?” Gault asked lightly, smirking.

“Demons.”

“Ahh, demons. Demons are the reason you met Tatiana in the first place are they not?”

“Yes.”

“And you are supposed to be a ‘demon hunter’, is this not correct?” Gault asked.

“Yes,” I answered. He frowned, not liking my short answers.

“Some of us find that difficult to believe,” he said, watching my response. I didn’t provide one.

After a moment he spoke again.

“We feel a test is in order. To see this vaunted ability of yours,” he said, gesturing to Hosokawa, who in turn gestured to a guard up by the door that I didn’t like.

The guard opened the door and another vampire led three chained girls into the room. All three were filthy, disheveled and wild-eyed. The first two looked crazy, the third was possessed.

“We would like you to pick out the possessed one –“ he started to say, but I moved before he could finish.

My left hand pointed at the possessed girl and pulled, yanking the demon from inside of her. The force of its extraction slammed her against the handrail hard enough to bend her partway over it.

The greasy black demon ripped free from her body and flew to my hand, screaming in a voice that assaulted the ears of every living being in the room. I held my left hand high over my head, the writhing black blob squirming around it, and then called >Kirby< in my mind.

The giant God-Hawk screeched as he popped into our dimension, his raptor’s eyes locked on my left hand. Two flaps of his giant wings and the car-sized shadow-bird was across the vast room and ripping the demon from my hand with talons the size of bananas. He didn’t immediately snap out of existence but instead flapped his wings in front of the Conclave, buffeting them with enough wind to blow all their notes off their desks, then finally disappeared with an audible pop.

For long moments there was no motion in the room other than papers settling to the floor. The vampires were frozen, completely, their eyes locked on me. Hosokawa finally flicked a finger and several assistants sprang up from seats behind the Patrons and started to collect the scattered notes. Above, the two sanity challenged girls looked shocked while the girl who had recently been possessed was passed out.

“I think the intention was to simply identify the possessed girl,” said a smooth female voice. Chilka, the Japanese Patron, looking slightly amused.

“It was the last girl,” I said.

“I..we did not give you leave to act,” Gault said.

“You did not specify a manner of indicating my selection,” I replied.

“Pointing would have sufficed,” Tavian said, also looking a touch amused.

“Noted,” I said.

“The reports I’ve read indicate you must touch the possessed in order to exorcise the demon?” Gultekin asked from far down the arc.

“My abilities have grown,” I replied. Hell, I hadn’t even known I could yank a demon out from across the room. I had just simply reacted at its presence.

“You have vampire abilities as well?” Mausya asked.

“Most of them. Speed, strength, senses, energy manipulation. Healing, too.”

“Tatiana is twenty-five, yet she is almost the equal of the vampires in this room,” Lison noted. Chilka snorted at that before the French vampire could go on. I agreed. Tanya wasn’t the equal of the vampires in the room, she had surpassed them. Lison shot a glare at the Japanese vampire then continued. “How do you stack up against Tatiana?”

“She exceeds me greatly,” I replied.

“He is not being truthful,” Berit spoke suddenly. The mind reader had stayed quiet to this point. I checked my mental shield and found it solid. Her eyes narrowed as she studied my face. Hmm, she might be able to read micro-expressions as my friend Gina does.

“Care to correct that statement,” Lison suggested.

“I am generally not her equal. At times, if I lose my temper, I improve.”

“He’s still understating, but that’s true in the main,” Berit said.

“Hosokawa-san? What is your opinion?” Frimunt asked.

The Guardian of the Conclave snapped a quick bow then spoke.

“Gordon-san exceeds every Darkkin in this room when he…loses his temper. Otherwise his abilities are somewhere around two hundred years or so,” Hosokawa said.

“Oh come on! I can’t buy that! Does he exceed even you, great Duelist?” Frimunt said.

“Hai! Although I have much greater experience,” Hosokawa said in an even tone.

Frimunt snorted in disbelief.

“Tatiana is twenty-five. How long have you been...like a vampire?” Mausya asked.

“About two years,” I answered. The vampires all froze again, as still as statues, contemplating my answer.

“Absurd!” Atta said. Frimunt nodded in agreement.

“I think a test is in order,” the big blond German vampire suggested

“No!” Hosokawa said forcibly. “That would be very unsafe. I will not allow it.”

The other vampires looked at him with disbelief.

“May I remind you Guardian, that you follow my directions,” Gault said.

“Unless the safety of the Conclave is threatened, then my direction supersedes yours,” Hosokawa answered. “Pressuring Gordon-san into…losing his temper would be a grave mistake. I could not ensure the safety of the Patrons.”

“Ridiculous!” Frimunt said. “You’re just protecting your Elder’s pet!”

Hosokawa’s eyes turned icy. “Are you suggesting that I have compromised my honor in the execution of my duties as Conclave Guardian?” he asked in a deadly quiet voice.

The look on Frimunt’s face was priceless when he realized he had just insulted the honor of the Duelist. Gault hastily came to his rescue. “I think, Hosokawa-san, that Patron Frimunt was worried that you might have a conflict of interest in young Gordon here.”

Hosokawa did not look mollified. “Perhaps you mean to say that the very high esteem I have for Gordon-san’s abilities have led me to overstate the danger?”

“Of course, Guardian Hosokawa. I would never question your honor,” Frimunt said, visibly worried.

The deadly look left the Duelist’s eyes, but he still looked a bit peeved. “Then I will reassure the Conclave that my evaluation of the danger involved in such a test is solid and perhaps even conservative.” He looked carefully around the room, meeting each Patron’s eyes.

“Unless you wish to replace me as Guardian of the Conclave, then you will accede to my judgement in this. No testing of Gordon-san.”

The room was quiet for a moment, then a soft, yet surprisingly deep voice spoke from the far end of the arc. “I would agree with Hosokawa-san, based on what I know of this one,” said Jarib Salazar, the South American Patron. He was studying me coldly, like I was a dangerous snake.

“You have knowledge for the Conclave, Jarib?” Gault asked, curious.

“This…creature before us is vastly more dangerous than you realize,” the sharp featured Salazar began. “Are you aware of a gang of were’s called ‘Loki’s Spawn’?”

Several heads nodded. Elisabeta spoke up. “Mixed species weres right? Didn’t they almost expose their natures to the humans?”

“They did expose their existence to humans – challenged them in fact. This – “ he visibly struggled for a word, “- abomination made a deal with the humans and wiped them out – by himself!”

“Is that true?” Lison asked.

“Which part?” I responded.

“All of it,” she snapped.

“Yes, I hunted Loki Spawn, but I had help. Yes, the US government is fully aware of both weres and vampires.”

Gault and Lison both spoke at once. “You exposed us to the United States government?” came out of Lison’s mouth as Gault asked “How many Loki did you kill directly?”

I decided the Prolocutor’s answer should come first, plus I thought Lison was really kind of a bitch.

“I’m not sure of the total, but maybe between four and five hundred or so. Possibly more,” I said to Gault, then turned to Lison. “The federal government has been aware of Darkkin and weres for decades. They have special agencies assigned to monitor both species. Are you telling me that the governments in Europe have no idea of your existence?”

“Don’t be asinine. Of course they know, but in Europe we have much better control of the central governments then here on the frontier,” Lison answered.

Frontier? Really?

Gault looked at her in brief annoyance then turned back to me.

“These weres you killed…what manner of weapon did you use? Silver nitrate bombs, silver bullets?”

I shifted stance, not quite comfortable with how I would have to answer.

“I did shoot some. Most killed in close quarters combat.”

That didn’t sound so bad, right?

“Close quarters? Like with a sword?” he persisted.

“Yeah, close enough to use a sword,” I answered.

Berit spoke up. “Did you use a sword or ax?”

“Er…no,” I answered.

“What did you use?” Gault asked.

“Mostly my hands and feet.”

“You killed five hundred weres with your hands and feet?” he asked, incredulous.

“Well I did shoot a few,” I answered, sounding a little lame.

There was silence for a moment then a new voice spoke up.

“This is fascinating and all, but haven’t we strayed rather far from the question of Fedor’s death?” Chilka asked.

“Actually not,” Mausya said. Part of me noticed how closely the others listened whenever she talked.

“Twenty-five years ago a miracle happened – a vampire was born. The only one of our kind to actually be born as a full vampire. It was right out of prophecy. It was…disturbing. Something new after millennia of mostly stable Darkkin history. Many saw her as a sign of redemption, others as a sign of apocalypse. As a race we have all followed her growth to adult hood, marveled or trembled at how advanced she became in a few short years. Her emotional response to the death of her blood nurse was disappointing, but then she snapped out of it and is again growing by leaps and bounds. And this…man…is at the center of her renewal. She has claimed him as her Chosen, despite his not being a true Darkkin. Our most powerful Elder died in his presence, crushed to complete and true death like – how did you say it? Oh yeah, a tube of toothpaste. Droll. Now, little more than two years later, the creature who appeared in our midst has become formidable enough to kill weres with his bare hands. Tell me, honorable Hosokawa-san, have you ever killed a were with bare hands?”

Hosokawa stilled for a moment, then answered. “Hai. Twice.”

“How many did you kill?” Mausya asked.

“One each time.”

“Was it difficult?” Mausya continued.

“I would not recommend it,” the Japanese champion admitted.

“Mr. Gordon, how many weres have you killed with your hands at one time?” she asked me.

“Umm, not sure of the most,” I answered awkwardly.

“What’s the term? Ah, yes, just give us a park number,” she encouraged.

“Ah, that’s ‘ballpark’ I think you mean,” I corrected. She just nodded and made a ‘get on with it’ gesture with her hand.

“Maybe fifty. Tanya and I together killed a bit over a hundred once,” I added quickly, wondering if that sounded better.

“Fifty!” she looked around the room at each of her fellow Patrons before looking back to me. “Fifty full grown weres!”

“Bah! So he says!” Frimunt exclaimed.

Mausya studied me. “Oh, I believe him. Just as I believe our Guardian when he says that he can’t guarantee our safety from Gordon here. In fact, that is really the whole point. The safety of our species from this man. He has already worked with the humans to eradicate one of the most violent groups of non-humans in recent memory…and he did it mainly by himself…without weapons!”

“You paint him an uncontrolled monster, yet he is Chosen of Tatiana and she would not permit him to harm our species!” Chilka said sharply.

“See, that’s where I think you may have it wrong. I think, based on what I’ve heard from some fellow Russian vampires who have firsthand knowledge, that she doesn’t exert control over him…he controls her!”

Chapter 33

“What? Are you on drugs? Some kind of vampire crack?” I asked. “She doesn’t ‘control’ me and I certainly don’t control her! Have you met the girl? Control? That’s crazy. And if your ‘source’ is good old uncle Illarion than you’ve been had! He’s a whiney little bitch who ran crying home ‘cause I wouldn’t let him take over America!”

Every vampire in the room looked at me like I was two cards shy of a full deck, but the flicker on Mausya’s face when I mentioned Illarion told me I had scored a hit.

“In fact, I did talk to Illarion. He said you murdered his servant and took over the Coven yourself when Tatiana was conveniently indisposed,” Mausya answered with slightly raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, ‘course he did. Tatiana was attacked with silver powder – by a South American vampire – “ I looked at Salazar as I said that part. “Galina and Lydia were stepping in to rightfully run things when Illarion made a power play. I told him no, he told his bodyguard to kill me and I objected to that. Have you watched the security video? I’m sure we can crank it up on a monitor for you.”

“Oh yes, I do recall some fantastic claim that Tatiana had been severely burned with silver. So bad in fact that she lost both eyes, yet when I saw her earlier she looked fine. How could that be?” the Russian vampire asked snidely.

“Talk to Dr, Singh. He healed her with virus rich blood.” I said crossing my arms.

“Not even an Elder’s blood is rich enough in virus to heal silver burnt eyes,” Frimunt said in disbelief.

“Whose blood was used Mr. Gordon?” Atta asked.

“Mine.”

“You are suggesting some rather fantastic claims,” Gault said.

“Yeah? Like the whole of Tanya’s existence isn’t fantastic? Or any of my story? Check the security tapes for Plasma where Tanya was attacked, check the tapes for Citadel when Illarion tried to take control, talk to Dr. Singh, talk to Arkady, talk to Elder Senka and by all means, go ahead and suggest that she’s a liar!” I shot back.

They were silent for a moment, then after a glance around at his fellow Patrons, Gault looked at me and spoke. “We are through with you for the moment, Mr. Gordon. Remain available as we will likely have more questions for you. You may go.”

I turned to leave but Frimunt spoke as I did.

“And watch your tone with your superiors, boy, or we may choose to chastise you,” he said, smirking at me.

I kept my face blank as I completed my turn and walked out, feeling a huge bulls eye painted on my back.

***

I found our quarters empty, so after grabbing a pemmican bar from my personal stash I went looking for Chet to see how he was doing. I found him in Dr. Singh’s office. Most vampires don’t get sick and almost all wounds heal rapidly, so Singh really didn’t have sick bed facilities, but a cot had been brought in and six of Arkady’s security bruisers were lined up in front of Singh’s door to prevent further attacks. They all knew me and let me right through.

Chet was sitting up in bed, typing on an iPad while sipping beef broth from a giant stainless steel coffee mug.

“Hey dude, how ya feeling?” I asked.

“Chris, my man!” he said, then started to sit up. I moved to the bed before he could more than twitch, sitting on the edge of his cot so that he didn’t have a need to sit up.

“Damn dude, stop going all blurry like that! Gives me flashbacks!” he said.

“Sorry Chet. I just didn’t want you having to move on my account.”

“I’m not that bad. Just bruised and slightly anemic. Doc’s got me on this high iron and protein liquid diet so I’m healing quick. Plus,” his voice dropped to a whisper. “Senka gave me some of her blood and I feel really pretty great! Better than any drug I ever heard of.”

“Yeah I she told me about that. She holds you in high regard,” I said to my friend.

“Damn straight! I got skills and the vamps know it!”

I laughed although he was right.

“I heard you used your own freaky skills to get likenesses of the guys that jumped me,” he said.

“Yeah I did. Have you heard if they got anything out of them?” I asked.

“Well, Nika said they were tough nuts but that it seemed they worked for some German vamp. I think they both died during questioning,” he said.

German vamp sounded suspiciously like Frimunt, who I had already decided was pretty much a total dick.

We chatted for a few minutes more and then I left when he started to look a little peaked. My link to Tanya told me she was somewhere in the business center, probably doing business things so I headed to Remy’s kitchen to get something more substantial than pemmican.

The master chef was starting a soup stock, but as soon as he saw me he grabbed a plate of fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, Italian bread and olive oil. It was more platter than plate, covered with the better part of a loaf of toasted bread which was still warm.

“You all right Christian?” the French vampire asked.

Nodding around a mouthful of tomato and cheese, I gulped it down and answered.

“Mostly, Remy. A bit weirded out by the Conclave and all,” I admitted.

“Large groups of older vampires are creepy,” he said, adding a goodly dose of salt to his pot.

I looked at him sideways. He noticed.

“What? You think you’re the only one to feel that way? I’m one hundred and thirty-seven years old and some nights it feels like I’ve been on this planet too long. But a Darkkin who reaches six centuries or more of age is almost a whole different species than us younger ones. I don’t mean just in terms of strength and speed. Their whole personalities are different. The way their brains work is upside down and sideways to a regular human, were or young vamp. They get paranoid, spend all their time plotting and planning.”

“Why is that, Remy?” I asked, shoveling another oily slab of cheesy tomato goodness into my mouth.

“Living past your fourth and fifth centuries is a big deal. Lots of dangers out there. Other supernaturals, human vampire hunters, even accidents, but the biggest danger is other vampires. We are a violent species, more so than the base human stock, which is saying something. Even with Elders and the Coven, there are enough violent disagreements that the stupid vamps get weeded out quick,” he said, dumping a small bowl of mixed spices into his cauldron of soup.

“My grandfather used to tell me that old big rack white-tail bucks are like a separate species from the other deer. Much smarter and craftier,” I said.

“A decent analogy, although deer are hunted and Darkkin are hunters so maybe an old crocodile would be a better comparison. Crocs have to survive weather, predators, drought and, of course, other crocs.”

“Remy, I didn’t realize you were such a naturalist,” I said.

“Discovery channel and Animal Planet. Amazing shows, really,” he said with a sly smile.

“I never pictured you watching television,” I said.

“Have to, Christian. You have to keep involved in society’s changes, both good and bad. Isolating yourself will leave you feeling separated from life itself. Once a Darkkin or other long lived being,” he pointed at me as he said that, “shuts themselves away from the world, death is not far away.”

Feeling separated is exactly how I felt in the Conclave when Senka had been speaking. My poker face must have failed me, because Remy read me like an open cookbook.

“Ah, you feel that way now, yes?” he asked, smiling.

“I don’t belong here, Remy. I don’t even fit in with the new vamps. Plus everyone is always on guard around me, like they’re torn between being afraid of me and wanting to drink me dry.”

“Christian, when I first became a vampire I was miserable. My whole life, my human life, had been about food. Creating, tasting, enjoying new cuisine. And I was very good at it. That was gone when I woke from my ‘death’ and found that all my cravings were only for blood. It made me sick. Not that I’m squeamish about blood; a good chef must deal with blood daily. But the loss of my life’s passion was almost too much. I wanted to true die.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“An older vampire steered me through it. She taught me that I could still cook and create, in fact, now my senses of taste and smell were so much greater that I could produce dishes undreamed of. And I could enjoy my own cooking if I sipped blood from a human who had eaten my food. Not exactly as it was when I was human, but not bad and in some ways better. I don’t have an interest in vampire politics, I just keep my head down and do what I love – cooking.”

“It was Senka who helped you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes it was. Of all the older vampires, she is best at preserving talent and mentoring young vampires,” he said, smiling. “Of course, she’s utterly ruthless and more cunning than all the rest combined,” he added with a shrug. “C’est la vie!”

I felt Tanya approaching and knew she was tracking me down, so I finished the last bruschetta and took the platter to the sink, washed it and was drying it when she entered the kitchen. Remy greeted her, saw how intensely she was staring at me and excused himself.

“Hey babe,” I said, trying to get a read on her mood. Both her body language and the link told me she was anxious about something to do with me.

“How was the Conclave?” she asked as she slid further into the kitchen and into a chair at the prep table I had been eating at.

I felt myself grimace. “They’re mostly kind of assholes and we spent almost the whole time talking about me and not Fedor.”

She froze for a split second. “What did they ask you?”

“First they started to ask about Okwari, then got all intense about me and how many weres I’ve killed and how dangerous I am and that I secretly control you and make you do what I want.”

Her face held something I had almost never seen there before – fear. She was frightened of my words.

I tried to lighten her mood. “Of course my argument to that is that if I truly controlled you, we would never leave the bedroom.”

She smiled at that and reached for my hand then looked pensive again.

“The control part came from Mausya, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, you don’t seem surprised.”

“Lydia and Nika heard that rumor going around, the one that you are secretly running everything through some mind control power you have over me. Mausya seems to be the source of these rumors.”

“Yeah, but I think she got the idea from good ole Uncle Illarion, ‘cause she flinched when I brought his name up.”

She nodded at that, then looked me in the eye. “Tell me everything they said and did!”

I did. Twenty-seven minutes later she finished cross examining my recollection of the Conclave.

“Christian you must promise me to keep your temper at all times when you’re in there. I think that Mausya is using this story to increase her chances of getting selected as the next Elder. If she can convince others that you are a threat to me and the Coven, it gives her a unique platform for election. I think part of that strategy is going to be to trick you into losing your temper. If you hurt or kill someone, particularly one of her rivals, it increases the odds for her.”

“That makes sense. I’ll keep cool. Arkady told me to keep my temper too.”

“I doubt Arkady knows about this theory. He just knows your temper. Chris, you have to be really, really controlled in there. Always remember she will try to trip you up.”

I reassured her a dozen times I would behave. Finally, she glanced at the clock on the wall and announced she had to be at the business center in two minutes. A long kiss goodbye and she was gone, leaving me with my thoughts.

Chapter 34

Three hours later I was recalled before the Conclave. Gault got right down to business.

“So, according to your story, Vadim and Anton took you from the night club when this demon fight was finished. The demon was dead or gone or what have you and you were unconscious, correct?”

“Yes.”

“What happened next?” he asked.

“I woke up in a shipping container down by the waterfront. Vadim and Anton came in. Anton bragged about how Tanya would follow me to the shipyard and they would kill her and use her blood to produce a much stronger street drug with the demons help. I told them the Elders would kill them but then Fedor appeared and claimed credit for the whole plan,” I said.

He made a ‘go on’ motion with his hand.

“At that point I think I may have insulted his intelligence.”

“You did what?” Atta asked, incredulous.

“Well, the plan was to spread the drug through society and cause a breakdown in order which would allow Darkkin to step forward and assume visible control. I laughed at that because while I don’t know much about vampires, and even less back then, I do know demons.”

“So what? The plan sounds at least plausible,” Frimunt said.

“Demons don’t do anything for anyone but themselves. That many berserk humans would have been nothing more than a fertile field to plant thousands and thousands of demons. The vampire age of rule would have lasted all of two weeks.”

“Demons would be that able to use the drugged humans?” Elisabeta asked.

“Absolutely. Perfect vessels for demonic possession.”

“What happened next?” Gault asked.

“They thought Tanya would take hours to figure out where I was,” I said. Both Tavian and Elisabeta snorted at that. The others looked at them curiously. Tavian explained.

“Chosen know where their partners are all the time. Separation by a few miles would mean nothing,” he said.

I nodded. “Tanya was already on the way with the other Elders and more. Fedor and company wasn’t ready for her so things got rushed. Anton and Vadim went to meet her while Fedor decided that my death would leave her disoriented.”

“That’s when the god spirit showed up?” Mausya asked, completely fascinated.

“Yeah, he ripped the whole front of the container off. Fedor couldn’t see him and when he stepped forward to investigate Okwari smashed him with both paws at once. It was like getting hit by a train…actually, two trains – head on. Even an Elder vampire can’t survive that degree of instant damage.”

They were all quiet, but not motionless. Several, Berit and Gault, were taking notes. Tavian and Elisabeta looked thoughtful.

“That matches what we have heard from other testimony. It also lends support to him actually being Tatiana’s Chosen,” Tavian said. His mate nodded.

“I would have no trouble tracking Tav’ anywhere in this city,” the red-headed vampiress said.

“Where is this god now?” Mausya asked suddenly.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’m led to believe that he was given only a short time in this realm before he was forced to leave for good.”

“What could force an ancient god to leave?” Chilka

They all looked at me. I shrugged.

“God Himself. The Big Guy. God with a capital G. Yahweh!” I said.

“You believe that?” Mausya asked. She leaned forward slightly.

“Yeah, I do.”

“You claim your gift with demons is God-given?” she asked.

“I think so. All of the clergy who’ve ever seen the results of my exorcisms are convinced of it.”

“But you don’t know for sure? It is possible your demon power comes from demons themselves?” she suggested.

“That’s always been a fear. But it seems more and more unlikely, seeing as I’m interfering with their plans on a regular basis.”

I didn’t mention that I also had regular conversations with an Angel who reassured me that I was on the side of the good guys.

“Your family was brutally murdered when you were a child, no?” Mausya asked. “You claim it was a demon?” She made it sound unlikely.

“It was,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“After that you suddenly got these exorcism powers?” Gault asked.

“They appeared four years later.” I answered.

“The demon stabbed you with a hypodermic needle during your fight at the club. What was in it?” Mausya asked suddenly.

Where she learned that piece of information I would love to know. I had deliberately avoided all mention of it. Still, now that it was out there, hanging overhead like a dangling blade, I needed to answer.

“I believe it was blood,” I said.

“Blood? How strange. Blood from who?”

“I think it was blood from the demon’s victim.”

They looked at me blankly.

“You know, the person whose body the demon possessed.”

“So you were injected with demon blood, which knocked you out,” Mausya stated.

“I don’t think actual demon blood exists in this realm or dimension as they come here incorporeal. But I do think it was blood from the body the demon inhabited. Whether it was what knocked me out or a blow from the fight is uncertain,” I said.

“Why would it do that?” Gault asked.

“I don’t know. Dr. Singh felt that the victim’s blood was changed by the presence of the demon. He theorized that it might have a destabilizing effect on me, but we don’t know for sure.”

“Half-truths,” Berit said suddenly.

“Care to elaborate?” Atta asked with a cold smile.

“Not really. If I’m speaking ‘half-truths’ it’s because I don’t know the answers. I can guess or form theories but I don’t know for certain,” I said, putting all the conviction I could into my statement. The God Tear necklace warmed slightly on my chest, making its presence known.

The Patrons looked at Berit, who kept her cold eyes on me, but nodded grudgingly after a moment.

“Funny you should mention Dr. Singh. He testified a little earlier,” Mausya said. “He feels very strongly that the demons altered a vampire protein and created the street drug Hance. A drug that destabilizes its user’s inhibitions and makes them dangerously psychotic. Wouldn’t straight demon blood do even worse?”

“You would have to ask him that. But since you’re asking me I’ll surmise that twisting a vampire protein is gonna have a bigger effect than twisting a human blood protein.”

“Ah, but your blood was riddled with all kinds of vampire proteins as well as the V squared virus itself by the time you were injected. By your reasoning that should be even worse.”

I shrugged again.

“I’m not following your line of questioning. If you’re asking if I’m a twisted psychotic then I have to say no.”

“Really?” she said with a wondering tone of voice. “But you do suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder, do you not?”

Oh shit! That was so not a conversation I wanted to have.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to gather my thoughts.

“Oh come now, Mr. Gordon. Isn’t it true that you have at least one other complete personality that manifests itself when you – how did Hokosawa put it? – ‘lose your temper’.”

“I’m not an expert on psychology, Ma’am. From what little I know, patients with Multiple Personality disorder are not usually aware of their other personalities. What I have, is more of a persona than a distinct personality. A facet of my total personality that is somewhat more specialized.”

“Actually you are incorrect. Many patients with MPD are aware of the other personalities. But you do admit to another personality?”

“Persona, I have another persona just as you have your Patron persona and your private, chew on the neck of your favorite blood donor persona.”

She laughed at me. Not pleasantly, but condescendingly.

“Semantics, Mr. Gordon. What I do know is that you’ve admitted that you have a separate ‘persona’ which I understand is extremely violent and that you’ve been injected with an incredibly powerful mutagenic substance that has been shown to produce intense psychosis and uncontrolled rage in humans.”

“It sounds bad when you put it like that,” I said, a really sick feeling forming in my stomach. I was also struggling with my temper as her words kept digging at me like a sharp shovel.

She arched her eyebrows. “Bad? Mr. Gordon, humans ingesting Hance and bringing Darkkin blood chemistry into the realm of modern science is bad. A mutated supernatural being with an ultra-violent split personality pumped full of a super psychosis inducing substance who also has a psychic bond with the hope and future of the Darkkin race is a catastrophe many orders of magnitude greater.”

Her vampire playing card hadn’t outlined her human job during her first ‘life’, but I was willing to bet she had been an attorney. In just a few words she had managed to twist my life into a major threat to vampire kind. My dark half wanted to have a few moments alone with her. I shoved it back down and found my right hand touching the God Tear without conscious thought.

“Humans call that spin, Ms. Mausya. Twisting words around to paint a particular picture. Myself, I would prefer to point out that your ‘hope and future’ has bound herself to a uniquely competent bodyguard that can heal her of catastrophic injury and will take on any ‘enemy’ that threatens her, anywhere, anytime,” I said.

“We all like to see ourselves as the hero, Mr. Gordon. That’s human nature even for people who are more than human. I’m pretty sure Hitler saw himself as a hero. But don’t fool yourself. You are a danger to Tatiana and every other vampire in existence.”

“How many vampires have you killed Mr. Gordon?” Chalka asked.

“Seventeen,” I answered.

“How many of those seventeen were a threat to either Tatiana or had Challenged your place as her Chosen?” she asked.

“All of them,” I said.

“How many demons have threatened Tatiana?” she continued.

“At least two directly,” I said.

“What happened to them?” she asked

“I sent them back to Hell.”

“And we’ve already established the fact that you killed off a pack of weres that directly attacked Tatiana as well as Senka, Galina, and others from this Coven,” she said.

“What’s your point Chalka?” Gault asked, puzzled.

“Isn’t it obvious? She – “ pointing at Mausya “ – wants us to believe him a danger to Tatiana and Darkkin everywhere. He contends he is a better protector of our young Full Blood than anyone else. I’m just pointing out that the facts seem to support his contention. We’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time on this farce and I, for one, would like to get back to the business of selecting the next Elder.”

Mausya was frowning, her head tilted slightly to one side. I was beginning to think that particular mannerism was what she used when she was reading probabilities or whatever it was she did.

“I do not think a direct threat to the life of the only Full Blood Darkkin in history is a ‘farce’,” she said. “My point is that he is unstable and could snap and kill her.”

“Let’s ask our experts on Chosen,” Chalka said, turning to Tavian and Elisabeta who both looked surprised.

“Is it possible for either of you to hurt or harm the other?” Chalka asked.

They both shook their heads in exactly the same manner and at the same time.

“Impossible. It would be like harming yourself. We feel each other’s pain when we’re wounded and share our emotions,” Elisabeta explained.

“Now can we please move on?” Chalka asked.

Gault glanced once at the three candidates, his gaze lingering on Mausya the longest. When none of the three said anything he gave a slight nod.

“Mr. Gordon, you may leave,” he dismissed me. I turned to leave and found Hosokawa approaching me as I moved.

“I will walk you out Gordon-san,” he said matter-of-factly.

Caught off guard, I nonetheless nodded and slowed to let him catch up with me.

Pitching his voice lower than a human could hear right next to him or a vampire could hear across a room he spoke. “You did very, very well,” he commended me. “I have been meaning to talk to you about our…training session. I handled it poorly. But one thing you need to learn is how to draw energy from your environment. It is a Darkkin technique, much like basic energy manipulation, but instead of projecting the power, you have to sort of internalize it. It would help you greatly with your…calorie needs. Slow the rate of fuel usage. If you like I can show you how to do it. It’s an advanced technique, but you will have no problem.”

His sincerity won over my Grim fueled distrust. He was either being entirely honest with me or was the world’s foremost actor hiding in a concrete cave under Manhattan.

“Ookay. Thanks,” I said. He gave me a nod then gestured to the door which was being opened by a guard. I slipped out, glancing back once to see the deadly fighter watching me with a slight smile.

Chapter 35

My break from the Conclave lasted a full four days this time. I hung out with Chet for a day till he was well enough to go back to work, filled out reports for Lydia on the most recent Rover assignments that Tanya and I had worked on and fed myself back to a decent weight. There were even two sessions with Hosokawa where he taught me some about absorbing vampire energy from the environment and using it to partially offset my freakish metabolism. I had been absorbing energy all along, using it to Cling, Push, Pull, Harden, Post or Lighten as needed. The Japanese warrior taught me to internalize the power and sort of feed it to my cells. It helped slow my hunger and I could see it making a difference between living and having my body eat itself, although it would never fully satiate my need for calories.

I also got to spend time with Tanya, although not as much as I would have liked. Senka had her busy with several projects, none of which she was inclined to talk about. Unfortunately I also had enough time to brood on my growing discomfort with the wonderful world of vampires. It didn’t help that a constant stream of humans was brought in to feed the old vampires of the Conclave and their assistants. Despite the Coven’s access to blood banks, the older vamps greatly preferred live dinner over bagged donor blood. The human ‘food’ was supposedly all volunteers who had willingly signed medical consent forms for blood donation. The ones I saw had the slightly fanatical look of junkies that I had learned to identify with humans who got off on being bitten.

I didn’t like it. And making matters worse was the occasional rumor of a few, who despite all precautions, died during the feedings.

So when the summons came, I was in less than a stellar mood. Trudging along the corridors to the amphitheater my mood grew darker and darker. I didn’t want to be here, didn’t belong here and really didn’t want to be stared at by a bunch of old vampires who shouldn’t be judging anyone.

I walked right up to the open doors, passed the two guards who didn’t react to my presence and straight into the Conclave’s chamber. They were arguing, at least that’s how it looked to me. Atta, Mausya and Frimunt were all simultaneously explaining their positions, and their election platform appeared to be the fate of the human race. No one noticed me so I took a seat in the stands and watched.

“Fedor had the right of it!” Frimunt said. “We are the top of the food chain, so why not make it visible?”

“Have you forgotten the whole pitchforks and torches thing?” Atta answered. “Humans are weak and feeble…until you bunch them up. Now they number in the billions and you want to frighten them by exposing us?”

“Humans are dangerous, not only in numbers, but with technology. Senka is right about us staying behind the scenes until we have an edge,” Mausya added.

“Bah! We have all the edges we could ever want! We can hunt them in the dark, remind them why they fear the night!” Frimunt argued. “Although I will admit that their numbers have grown excessive. So maybe a culling is in order, something like the Black Plague which was so effective before.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant. We killed off a major portion of our food supply during the Dark Ages. It left vampire against vampire for those small food populations that were left. Your mind has grown soft and spongy Frimunt!” Atta said. “And Senka is a sentimentalist! Partner with humans? Insanity. And use the Full Blood to do it? She’s barely adult and saddled with that …abomination.”

“Where is Gordon? Did you not summon him Gault?” Mausya asked suddenly.

“The abomination is sitting right here!” I said, standing.

Twelve heads snapped around to stare at me, twelve faces flickered with micro frowns before smoothing into the standard blank look of old vampires.

“You’re here,” Gault said, his voice level but I could read enough of the Patrons mannerisms now to know that he was honestly surprised by my presence. They all were which was ridiculous, because it is just about impossible to sneak up on a single vampire over the age of a hundred, let alone a dozen who each approached a thousand years.

“Yeah, you rang, I came,” I said.

They were all silent for a full thirty seconds. Finally, Gault spoke.

“You have spoken of the US government’s knowledge of Darkkin. We need more knowledge of this.”

“Yes, I heard, for your secret plans for world domination,” I snapped. They stilled again, except Hosokawa, who moved just slightly to better face me. In hindsight, my sarcastic tone was probably not the best way to address a dozen super predators, but I was having trouble controlling myself. The God Tear around my neck warmed slightly at my words.

“You eavesdropped?” Atta asked.

“I marched in here and stood for ten seconds then sat right here in front of all of you!” I shot back at her. “Maybe vampire senses decline with age.”

They all shifted at those words, flickers of anger crossing most of their faces. Some small part of me rang the alarm bell to ‘shut the hell up’ before I got bitten by a dozen sets of fangs.

Frimunt’s anger was the most visible. He even started to get up from his mini-throne but Gault motioned him to stay where he was. He obeyed the non-verbal request although he flashed a nasty glare at the Prolocuter.

“How much do the humans know?” Gault asked, attempting to move past the suddenly volatile atmosphere.

“About Darkkin? Quite a lot. They know of the Coven and its worldwide network. They know you have fingers in every area of the global economy and have influence over most governments.”

“How long have they known?” Mausya asked.

“Decades,” I answered. “At least, in terms of knowing about vampires. The part about the Coven may be more recent, I’m not sure.”

“What levels of the government know this?” Gault asked.

“From the President on down. Homeland Security as a whole sector assigned to vampires and weres.”

“They know of the Elders?” Mausya asked.

“Yes, Senka has spoken to some of their higher officials, but they knew of older vampires before that I’m pretty sure.”

“Senka has spoken to them?” Frimunt asked, his tone cold and dangerous.

“er, yes, at least once,” I said.

“Because of you!” Mausya said suddenly.

“Well, yeah I guess.”

“And now the Coven cowers underground!” Frimunt stormed. “This is a ridiculous state of affairs! They run from us – not us from them!”

He was working himself into a pretty good temper and I don’t know where it would have gone, but suddenly a small hand bell rang. It was just a small thing, like you see in movies where the sick person gets to ring a bell to get the attention of and on the last nerve of their parent/spouse/friend. Its effect was pronounced. All twelve vampires snapped their attention to the upper door that the possessed girl had come through when the Conclave had ‘tested’ me. This time the guard on duty led a string of young, fit looking humans through, most of them showing substantial skin.

“Lunch is served,” the upper level guard said in a serious voice, but he said it with a sardonic grin. The Patrons promptly forgot our conversation and kept all their attention on the upcoming ‘meals’.

The line of twelve humans came nervously down the amphitheater stairs, each one branching off to go to a different vampire. Their behavior was a blend of fear and anticipation, a mixture I’m told is extremely attractive to vampires. Most of them were roughly college age with several looking just barely legal. The last was a tiny slip of a girl in a thin, formless dress who definitely looked underage. Petit and lacking the curves of the other females, she looked about fourteen. She looked far more afraid than anxious and while the others all knew which vampire to go to, she didn’t. Of course it was Frimunt who raised his hand and waved her in his direction.

I found myself moving closer, studying the little girl who was practically shaking as she approached Frimunt. Her fear made him grin in anticipation – it made me see red.

“They have to be eighteen!” I said suddenly.

Most of the Patrons turned to me surprised, having forgotten my presence in the face of tasty treats. Frimunt looked the most off guard, but his surprise turned to anger.

“They are provided by the New York Coven. You can argue their ages with your Chosen,” Frimunt said, grabbing the girl by her wrist and pulling her onto his lap.

“Oh I will, but she’s coming with me till I get her age figured out,” I said, the God Tear suddenly warm on my chest.

“How old are you my dear? Eighteen?” Frimunt asked her, his voice oily.

Frightened out of her mind she shook for a moment before her head wobbled in the loosest of nods.

“There, see!” the German vampire said, opening his mouth wide to show extended fangs and slamming down on her neck like a striking rattlesnake.

“Bullshit!” I yelled, moving toward him. Suddenly he was standing, the girl torn from his fangs by the speed of his rising. Bright blood arched in jets from the torn arteries in her neck as the old blond vampire stared at me with killing hate.

My attention shifted to the girl who was clasping her neck, but when I moved forward I found my body locked to the ground and my arms restrained by Hosokawa. He was simultaneously holding me in a jointlock technique while using energy techniques to Post me. My right arm was jammed up and behind my back. Grim took over instantly, using my aura to break his Post. My vision had shifted to show the blue column of energy locking my feet to the ground and a short burst of purple aura slashed through it as I watched. Hosokawa was caught off guard which made Grim’s break of his arm hold easier. Grim dropped my body low in a squatty stance to gain room while my left hand slapped against my right shoulder, shoving it back toward Hosokawa and opposite the jointlock. The momentary lack of pressure on my arm and shoulder joint was enough for me to turn further into Hosokawa and shove while hooking my right leg behind his foot. He fell backward which allowed me time to turn back to the approaching blur that was Frimunt. Grim formed a deadly spear of aura in my right hand, but the God Tear thrummed on my chest, reminding me of my vow to Tanya not to lose my temper, and at the last moment I changed it to just a simple blast of power. I had hit many vampires with aura blasts just like it, sometimes at their own request. I thought of it as a stunner and while part of me questioned the effectiveness of it on a 900 year old vampire it would have to do. On the younger vampires I had used it on it had the effect of knocking them back to human condition for a short time.

This all happened inside the space of a single second, the three of us moving at very accelerated vampire speeds. Frimunt was only feet away when my blast hit him, then he freight-trained me flat. Grim sprang back to my feet, ready to face the angry German vampire. But Frimunt was on the ground writhing in agony and screaming while his body jerked and shook. The remainder of the Conclave crowded around, pushing me further back from the mortally wounded teenage girl.

A scream of torn metal and the popping of displaced air was all the warning we had of Senka and Tzao’s arrival on the scene. Tanya stood just behind the two Elders as they looked at Frimunt.

“What did you do?” Senka hissed at me.

“I just stunned him!” I replied as I worked my way around the vampires to the wounded teen.

Her brown hair, done up in a ponytail, was matted with her blood, her brown eyes huge and scared as she tried to keep her hand on her neck. I pulled her hand away and covered the wound with my own hand, summoning aura to bind her flesh back together. My one glimpse was enough to scare the hell out of me. Frimunt’s fangs must have been piercing her carotid artery when he tore free. The feeble pulse of blood against my hand and her rapidly dimming eyes told me time had run out along with her life force and no matter how much power I pushed into her she still died in my hands.

“You’ve killed him!” Atta said.

I looked over at Frimunt, who now lay still.

Whenever I’ve knocked a vampire into human condition before there had been an interesting side effect, at least on those vampires older than fifty or so years. While they remained human, their bodies had aged at an accelerated pace as if trying to catch up with their actual chronological years. The older the vampire the more pronounced the effect.

Frimunt took it to a whole new level. Nine hundred years of age had caught up to him in minutes. He probably died at the point his body reached two hundred years of withered age. By five hundred, his flesh was dried and flaking. At the full nine hundred, his skeleton, brown and crumbling, was all that remained. It looked like an ultrarealistic Halloween decoration, dressed in modern clothes.

“It seems that what stuns young vampires, kills old ones,” Senka said, looking at me, an odd gleam in her eye. Tzao was the first to leave, moving so fast that the air popped as it rushed into the vacant space she left behind. Mausya was next, disappearing after tilting her head at me for a second or two. The rest were gone almost as fast, gone like smoke in the wind.

Hosokawa and Senka were the last to go. The Japanese warrior gave me a short bow then vanished. Senka looked at Tanya and I, that odd flicker of something suspiciously like satisfaction on her face, then popped out of the room.

I looked to Tanya only to find her staring at me with a mixture of horror and shock. Tears slipped out of her eyes and I rushed to grab her arms. I might have thought her scared of me, but my link told me she was a veritable hurricane of emotions, with fear for me being dominant.

“Christian, you have to leave! Do you understand? They fled in fear, but they will attack you somehow if you stay!” she said in a rush.

“What?” I asked, looking at the blood on my skin where my hands held hers.

“Your simplest ability, the blast of aura you have used on dozens of young vampires is almost instantly lethal to the old ones! When you knock them human, it somehow releases their pent up age and they die! You have to leave now!”

“Wait, so they’re scared of me? So what? Vampires have been scared of me before,” I said, trying to understand her fear.

She shook her head furiously. “No, these are old vampires. They are generally scared of nothing, but when they do find a threat, they always, always find a way to remove it. That’s how they got to be old!”

“So we have to leave?” I asked, wiping my hands on my pants.

She stared at me without saying a word, tears streaming down her face. My bond told me the answer even as I put it into words.

“No, I have to leave. You’re staying here…to do what? Defend me?” I asked as I read the mixture of determination and resolve that she was broadcasting.

“Christian, if I go with you, there will be no one to explain things to them, no one to moderate their fear. By staying back I will be able to reassure them and try to make them see sense.”

“You’ll be a hostage...for my good behavior. They’ll know that I wouldn’t attack or harm you,” I said as the truth hit me. “I was trying not to hurt him – like you said – that’s why I stunned him.”

“I know dear one, I know. You didn’t know – I didn’t know that this would happen. No one did,” she said, pushing me toward the entrance. Part of me wondered about what she had said. Did no one really know that I could age an old vampire to death? The look on Senka’s face flashed back into my mind, even as I turned with my vampire and began to rush through the corridors. Somewhere during our run to our rooms, Awasos appeared, suddenly running alongside us in wolf form. The remainder of my stay in Citadel was a blur, in every sense of the word. Just enough time to grab some clothes and money and then I was gone.

Chapter 36

The restaurant was called Matty’s Steakhouse. It was on East 46th and it looked inviting. Big awning over the sidewalk with the name Matty’s on the side. Plus it was a steakhouse, which is the best place for a growing were bear-wolf.

I had wandered the streets of Manhattan for several hours after rushing up and out of Citadel, Awasos by my side. Frankly I was a mess, a seething cauldron of conflicting emotions and dark thoughts. I was devastated that Tanya was staying behind. Sure, it made logical sense for her to try and defuse the situation, but logic isn’t always my strong point. So I felt halved, sundered, and incomplete. But a whole other part of me was rejoicing in being above ground, with humans and far from vampires, especially old vampires. Have you ever been to New York City? It’s a really busy place – lots of life and huge energy. It felt great after the solemn and cold world of Darkkin.

I was also wrapped up in trying to figure out what the fuck had happened. How had the situation gone in the shitter so fast? I have a healthy dollop of paranoia in my character, the result of being the target of demonkind my whole life. So the filter I was using to sift through recent events kept kicking out conspiracy theories. Unlike UFO’s and government mind control, conspiracies in the vampire world are often more twisted and fucked up than even the most drugged out mind could come up with.

How had an obviously under-aged kid made it through the Coven’s vetting process for donors? Why was she there at precisely the same time I was? Why had she been slated to be the lunch morsel for the biggest douchebag in the Conclave? Why had Chet been attacked by allegedly German vampires? And the big question that kept popping up in my mind – why had Senka looked satisfied, even for a split second, by my killing Frimunt?

So, I was in a fine state of mind when the restaurant appeared. Anger? Outrage? Offended? You bet and a whole lot more. Thirty minutes on the streets and I was already tired of being stared at. Luckily that had died right off not long after, which in hindsight should have caught my attention. How does an angry looking guy in disheveled clothes with a small backpack, purple eyes and a huge wolf go unnoticed on the streets of New York?

For that matter how does the same guy and wolf walk into a well-run restaurant in Manhattan and claim a table without getting thrown out?

The waiters and waitresses walked right by our table for ten minutes before I finally spoke up to one of them. The waiter damn near jumped right off the floor when I asked for a menu. Giving me a strange look, he hastily complied. From there it was easy to get a pint of beer, four appetizers (Lump crab cakes, seared scallops, jumbo shrimp cocktail and an order of calamari), a wild boar chop (they had wild game on the menu), buffalo filet and two rib-eye steaks with all the extras. The looks I got were even more curious, but no one commented on the 250 pound wolf at my feet who was eating slightly more than his share of our dinner. That is until halfway through the rib-eyes when a passing waitress let out a little shriek and promptly beelined for the manager.

His eyes almost burst out of his head when he focused on the furry mass by my chair. Slightly over six feet tall with a beefy frame that was going to fat, dark hair and a full mustache and goatee, Shane the manager (that’s what his nametag said) came right over.

“Sir! You cannot have that…animal in here! This is a restaurant!”

“Why didn’t you tell me that when we came in? I followed you right to this table,” I said. I actually had followed him as he walked through the restaurant, but I don’t think he had noticed me behind him.

“You most certainly did not!” he said.

“Check your damn security videos,” I said, pointing at the camera on the wall with a meat laden fork.

“What? Don’t be absurd! Leave now or I’m calling the police,” he said.

I was so not in the mood for ultimatums. Pushed around by beings nine and ten centuries old was bad enough, being harassed by an out of shape thirty something wasn’t gonna fly.

“Call um. We’re finishing our steaks. Then we’ll leave. Although this is gonna impact my tip,” I said while chewing.

A foot patrol showed up fifteen minutes later while I was tossing my potato to Mr. Furryface, who really likes sour cream and waiting for my waiter to run my credit card. A male and female team in NYPD blue. The guy was a veteran of the force, tough looking but his body was going to fat. The girl was young, just out of the Academy. He looked Italian; she was tiny, Asian and kind of cute. Must have been hell to get through the Academy looking like a Japanese schoolgirl.

The manager intercepted them at the door, filling them in on my various transgressions, then angrily leading them to our table.

“Sir you can’t have that…Holy shit is that a horse?” the male cop said, eyes wide as he got a good look at Awasos. “You got tags for that elephant?” he asked.

I reached down and rotated ‘Sos’s collar so he could see the tags. If anyone ran the numbers they would come up legit courtesy of the Coven.

“Listen, Officer – Connell,” I said, reading his tag. His partner’s nametag said ‘Tran’ on it.

“That would have been fine if Shane here had told me that before we sat down to a $400 dinner. He led us right to this table and never said a word. Then he called me a liar when I pointed that out. But would he look at the security tapes? No, ‘cause he knows he’s wrong. Now he just wants my money and then for me to get the hell out.”

Shane sputtered and turned a really great shade of splotchy red.

“Why did you seat him and the pony here if the animal was a problem?” the cop asked.

“I never did!” Shane yelled.

“No? Than why did you wait till I got my second entrée before complaining?” I shot back.

The cop scratched his head, while his rookie companion stood in a parade rest stance that she hoped looked tough while trying not to laugh at the situation. Awasos had been lying on the ground, now he decided to sit up. His head came well above the tabletop. Everyone backed up and the cops put their hands on their guns.

“If he causes a problem, I’ll shoot him,” Officer Connell promised me. I must have frowned because he frowned back.

“He doesn’t like being shot and if you’re gonna shoot him with those,” I said, pointing at his Glock 9mm, “ – you’re just gonna piss him off.”

“Sir, I need to see some ID,” the tiny lady cop said suddenly. Connell frowned at her but let it go. My wallet was sitting on the table, waiting for my Coven issued credit card to come back. I handed her my license.

This should be…interesting.

This mini cop scanned my license with some kind of tablet unit and handed it back. Then she frowned at the almost immediate results.

“It says ‘File Five’?” she said to her partner. File five is a term that police dispatchers use to let an on scene officer know that the suspect in front of them needs further explanation without said suspect hearing. It’s a code word to get the officer to call dispatch and receive more information. It could be that the suspect is highly dangerous, or maybe a deep cover cop or just requires special handling.

“What?” he looked at her display then turned sideways to me so he could keep an eye on me as he walked twenty feet away, pulling out an iPhone as he did. The phone rang before he could turn it on.

“Connell,” he answered. I listened in.

“Connell, this is Dispatch. Did you or your partner just run a license for a ‘Chris Gordon’?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“All hell broke loose. This guy must be mega important to the feds ‘cause Homeland Security is on the other line. They want whoever ran the ID to back the hell off and leave him alone.”

“I’m not sure I can do that Dispatch. Public safety may be involved,” Connell said with a glance at Awasos. He didn’t sound all that set on the safety thing, just curious and fishing for info.

“Okay, now I got the Commissioner’s Assistant on the other phone with my boss and Homeland wants to be patched through to you directly. The heat level is high on this one so I’m patching them through.”

“Wait..Dispatch..”

“Officer Connell? This is Special Agent Forbes with Homeland Security. Are you in contact with a Christian Gordon?”

“Ah yes..I was just responding to a call about a disturbance at a restaurant,”

“Has Mr. Gordon killed or injured anyone?”

“Ere, nooo,” Connell trailed off, looking at me from across the room, his brow completely furrowed.

“What was the nature of the disturbance?”

“He’s eating dinner and has a horse-sized dog..wolf..dog with him, and he wouldn’t leave till he finished his steak.”

A new figure entered the steakhouse, catching the attention of everyone in the room. It probably happened wherever she went. Tall, lithe and platinum blonde she was beautiful by Manhattan standards. She was dressed in dark, painted-on skinny jeans tucked into black high-heeled knee boots, with a light blue loose fitted V-neck blouse that still managed to cling to her rather amazing chest. An oversized white faux python print purse was slung over one shoulder and she breezed into the room like she owned it. She flashed a dazzling smile at the cops and manager Shane as she breezed by them.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” she assured them as she walked up to my table, patted ‘Sos on the head and sat down.

‘Hi Stacia. You look great!” I managed to say as she leaned over, grabbed my mug of beer and sipped it. The view down her shirt distracted both me and the married guy to my right. The waiter two tables over poured water all over the table he was servicing.

“Hi Chris, you look a bit…down,” she said, focusing her brilliant green eyes on me and forgetting the rest of the room.

“It’s been a tough day,” I said.

Across the room Officer Connell was looking on wide-eyed and open mouthed. His partner looked suddenly uncertain, an effect that Stacia Reynolds has on many women.

“Officer Connell, what’s the current situation?” Agent Forbes asked on the phone.

“Ah, a beautiful woman just came in and sat down with the suspect,” Connell said without taking his eyes off Stacia.

“Black hair, blue eyes?” Forbes asked urgently.

“No blonde and I didn’t get the eye color,” Connell said. Officer Tran piped up. “Green.”

“Green Agent Forbes,” Connell said into the phone.

“Hmm, don’t know who that is. Here’s the deal Connell and it’s pretty much a career deciding one for you. We need you to back the hell off Mr. Gordon and leave him right alone.”

“Just leave?” Connell asked.

“Leave him like he’s poisonous! Got it?”

“Yeah, no problem Agent,” Connell said. He looked like the kind of guy who just wanted to get through his twenty years and start collecting a pension. His phone rang again as soon as he hung up.

“Hello?”

“Connell, this is Lt. Snyder, Assistant to the Commissioner. You have a Chris Gordon in sight?”

“Yeah, but I’m just leaving. Homeland wants me away from him. File Five and all that.”

“No! The Commissioner needs you to give him a message and my number. Ask him to call me whenever it’s convenient but as soon as possible! Got it?”

Connell looked even more puzzled as the Lieutenant rattled off a cell number which he wrote on the back of a card pulled from his shirt pocket.

Stacia smiled at me as all this went down, the both of us listening in on the calls.

“You’re growing your hair out,” I said, pretty much at a loss as to why she was there.

She flounced her platinum white hair and loosed a brilliant smile. “You noticed!”

Not noticing something about Stacia would be more unlikely. She had been beautiful when I met her on a dark campground in Vermont, wearing nothing but a thong with blood streaming down her perfect leg. But the LV virus she had contracted that night had taken her a level or two higher. The extra health and vitality that the virus lent its hosts shown in her skin, hair and eyes.

“So why are you here?” I asked. Connell was done writing and now making his way over to us.

“Oh, well, you see Brock and Afina have some work for you if you’re interested. Seeing as how you’re not dwelling underground anymore,” she said with a smile.

“News travels fast,” I commented.

“One of your chilly, pale friends called Afina, worried about you,” she said.

“Tanya?” I asked, absurdly eager.

She frowned at me and shook her head. “The little one I think. Lydia?”

I nodded. That fit.

“Mr. Gordon, everything seems okay, but the Commissioner’s office would like you to give them a call. Here’s the number.”

“Thanks,” I said, puzzled by the Commissioner’s interest.

“Hey what about the wolf?” Shane asked, outraged.

Connell looked at me a bit helpless.

“He’s a service wolf,” I said.

“There, see, service wolf. You gotta let him in, it’s the law.”

“We’re leaving anyway,” Stacia said, smiling. Both men forgot the conversation and probably their names.

“What’s the job?” I asked her as we walked out.

“Demons problems at another pack. North Carolina, I think.”

“How come you’re the one to always deliver messages to me?” I asked.

“Because I’m the only one who can always find you,” she said mysteriously as she sauntered out the door.

As if I didn’t have enough strange mysteries to think about.

I followed the beautiful blonde out the door, thinking of a beautiful brunette and wondered where my strange life would take me. In front of me, Awasos turned his giant head and glanced at me. His normally brown eyes flashed lava red and his big tongue lolled out of his mouth. He was laughing at me. Figures.

Epilogue

The Volvo Cross Country wagon might not have been as roomy as the Tahoe or the Suburban I was used to, but it handled a whole lot better, even with a huge wolf in back.

I was on a section of I-95 South that wasn’t too busy, so when my cell rang I could answer it without being too distracted.

“Dude, you really know how to make an exit!”

“Hey Chet! What’s happening?” I asked. There had been no contact from Tanya, Lydia or any of my other friends in the Coven so I had left town completely in the dark.

“Where to start? Well, Mausya won the title of Elder. She was a shoo-in after you demonstrated you could kill ancient vampires by simply farting in their direction,” Chet said.

“I did not fart!” I said.

“Yeah, right, that would probably destroy Manhattan. Anyway she got the spot but all she does is frown and tilt her head sideways. Especially when looking at Tanya.”

“How is Tanya…she hasn’t called me back.”

“She’s…fierce. Chewed out the entire Coven, Elders and all. Right after you left, the Patrons got all up in arms, you know ‘kill the evil mutant and stuff’. Anyway, everyone was in the Conclave amphitheater, Mausya was officially an Elder and T climbs up on an unused dais and rips into them. Asked them how it felt to be part of the pitchfork and torch group for a change. Suggested that by all means they should keep pressuring you because that’s worked out so very well for Loki Spawn and the government.”

“No way. What did Senka do?” I asked.

“She stood there and took it like the others, but secretly I think she was proud of T. Anyway, Tanya explained that so far you just get more dangerous when pressed and if they wanted to tackle you then go ahead, but she was out of it and could she have their stuff when you killed them all off. Dude, she was freaking brilliant! But since then she’s been pretty grim, pardon the pun. Been beating the bejesus outta Hosokawa in the gym.”

“Why won’t she call me back?”

“Cause, Dude, there are still whole groups of vamps that want to kill your ass. They watch her every move and I’m supposed to track your movements with your cell and credit card. That’s why I’m calling…to tell you to ditch both. Seeing as you’re headed out of town and all I figured it was safe to do it now.”

My companion in the passenger seat had been painting her toenails and must have made a mistake because she suddenly swore. It was quiet but still loud enough for Chet to hear.

“Who’s that?”

“Stacia, my Pack liaison to the Asheville Pack,” I replied, trying not to glance sideways at the long tan legs stretched out in front of her on the dashboard. How do chicks do that anyway?

“The super blonde? Oh shit! That’s not gonna go over well. And I gotta be the one to tell Tanya! You must freaking hate me!”

“Chet, it’s a business trip. Nothing more.”

“Oh yeah, right! Like dudes on business trips with superhot blondes never got into trouble before.”

Stacia, whose werewolf hearing let her listen into my entire conversation turned sideways and grinned.

“Tell him thanks for saying I’m hot,” she said.

Chet heard her without me repeating.

“I said ‘superhot’!” he said.

Stacia laughed and wiggled her freshly painted toes. She was an incredibly low maintenance travel companion. I guess it made sense, as she grew up poor in Vermont. But she had taken to the New York fashion scene with such verve that I had expected problems when the Alphas of the New York Pack insisted that I take her with me. Instead, she was easygoing, not particularly fussy and pretty funny. The hard part was that she didn’t seem to own any clothes that fit. The cutoff Daisy Dukes she was currently painted into were par for the course and her tee shirt appeared to be a size or so too small. It was losing the fight to contain her…assets. Distracting to say the least.

“Where you headed anyway?” Chet asked.

“Asheville, North Carolina.”

“What’s the gig?”

“The local pack down there is having some kind of problem that includes both demons and murder. Brock and Afina think I’m perfect for the job. Stacia is supposed to liase with them and get experience.”

“Oh I bet she’s got experience!”

Stacia’s head snapped around and glared at the phone.

“Look, Chris, I gotta go. Already pushing the boundaries with this call, if you know what I mean?”

“Tell Tanya that I love her.”

“Before or after I explain you’re traveling with a blonde bombshell?”

“Just do it, please?” I asked.

“You got it, boss,” he said and hung up.

I powered down the window and threw the phone out. I’d rip up the card at the next stop.

“You really love her don’t you?” Stacia asked.

“Oh yeah!” I answered.

“But if she loves you why did she make you leave?”

“You heard my call – the vampires would have tried to kill me. She needed to stay and calm them down.”

“So, the old ‘if you love something let it go’ thing huh?”

“Maybe partly. She knows how I feel, we are bonded.”

“Well she’s bonded. You not so much,” Stacia said, looking straight ahead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Chris, everyone knows that vampire bonds only truly work both ways when both partners are actually vampires. You’re not! You can break the bond if you want. She can’t.”

“I’m close enough!” I insisted.

“Really? Are you sure?” she said, then ended the conversation by putting her ear buds in and turning on her iPod.

I was sure though… wasn’t I? But deep down part of me wondered at that. The road stretched out in front of us and we were only halfway there. I sighed as I realized just how much time I had to dwell on her words. I wasn’t Darkkin, in fact I had no desire to be one, but I did want to be Tanya’s Chosen. So I had to find a way to reassure the older vampires and try to figure out Senka. She had been too self-satisfied for my taste. Sorting out demons for a were pack would be a nice distraction.

The current radio advertisement ended and a retro program came on. The first song up….’Werewolves of London’. Perfect.

The End.

Acknowledgements

As usual, writing this book has been a great learning experience. I need to thank my writing and martial arts mentors, Joe, Jim and Jesse Bruchac, particularly for details on Cheenos.

Marty Munson continues to be an outstanding proof reader and of course I have to thank my wife and daughters. Allison provided fashion details that I will never fathom and Emilee continues to find me the perfect writing music. My wife, bless her heart, continues to be my support.

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Epilogue