Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
A lexei
The address on the card leads me to a largely windowless building cast in concrete at the edge of an industrial center in a city that barely deserves to have a name. It is a dull, uninspiring place, which is saying something given the communist architecture that dominates so many places like these.
I could not care less about the beauty of the buildings, but I am aware of my surroundings. This is where my mate has been kept, perhaps. Unless, of course, this is the trap Piotr supposed it to be.
I check the address again. The building fits in this terrain, but it is hardly a place where an ancient vampire could be given his due. This is how their kind have to live, hiding in ugly places, and doing ugly things.
There’s a heavy metal door at the entrance, reinforced with iron or steel. It is not open when I try it, and I have no intention of knocking. It opens under the encouragement of a shotgun, which I happen to have tucked under my arm. I have no idea how that got there. I am making decisions without really being aware of them at the moment.
The interior is dimly lit, but that does not matter to me, of course. I can see quite well in the dark. I can also smell Anya. For the first time in weeks, I have my mate’s scent, and it is an intoxicating, heady, rewarding thing.
“Anya!” I shout her name.
I hear a little sound in response, not as though someone is being quiet, but as if someone is trying to be heard through heavy walls and dungeons. That is all I need. My senses are as sharp as they have ever been, entirely focused on the one thing that matters to me in the world: my mate.
I chase up through the stairs and passageways of the vampires’ lair, aware that the things are around me, but staying clear of me. This is almost certainly a trap. I know it, but I do not care. Anya’s scent is fresh and vital and she is here. That is all that matters.
“Anya!”
“Alexei!”
She calls out to me through a door, which I shatter into slivers with the impact of my body, making it burst off the hinges and out of the frame.
Finally, I see my mate.
She is dressed most strangely. Her hair has been curled, and bows have been tied into it. She is wearing a pink puffy silk dress that makes her look like my grandmother’s toilet paper covers.
“It wasn’t locked, you know,” she says. “I just couldn’t move. He won’t let me.”
I run to her and wrap her up in my arms, feeling her body against mine with the greatest of relief. She is stiff against me, not because of her own reluctance, but because the damn vampire is still exerting influence, even now, with her in my arms.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“I’m okay,” she assures me. “Now that you’re here, everything is okay. I told him this was ridiculous, but he insisted.”
“Who insisted?”
“ I did .”
I turn with Anya in my arms to face the undead creature who stole her. He is standing in the doorway behind me, surrounded by the shattered frame in a way that only serves to accentuate his uncanny grooming. There is not a hair out of place on his head, not a speck of dust on his suit. He repels reality and substitutes his own cold self instead.
“It’s time we talked, animal,” he says. I want to kill him, but that would require putting Anya down, and I want her out of here more. I am going to take her somewhere they will never be able to reach her. I am going to…
“We have nothing to talk about. I am leaving.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dom says. “This is a matter of my daughter, and your pack’s survival.”
“I don’t know anything about your daughter.”
“Of course you do. You’re holding her.”
The crazed undead lunatic thinks Anya is his daughter? That would explain why she has not been killed. It might be a delusion worth catering to.
“She’s my mate,” I remind him.
“In the eyes of the law, she’s nothing to you. She’s not married, is she? I see no ring on her finger. Were you going to do her the honor? Or did you intend to simply use her like an animal?”
Anya looks at the vampire, and then her eyes slide to me. There is a slight smirk on her lips, and she lifts her brow in what might be considered something of a challenge. She is playing along with the creature. I do not know why. It could be a survival instinct on her part, an attempt to ingratiate herself into the predator’s good graces.
“I had intended to wed, yes, but…”
“Then you must ask me for her hand.”
“Excuse me?”
The notion of asking a vampire for my own mate’s hand in marriage is ridiculous. She is my mate. I would kill every dead creature in the world for her.
“I have taken this female as my daughter,” Dom explains with a slight sigh that indicates his impatience with my stupidity. “I could have taken her as a pet. It is not uncommon for vampires to leash your kind, trot them about in ways designed to humiliate and hurt them. I have given your mate very special treatment.”
“You’ve dressed her like a doll.”
“She is a doll, isn’t she? She is pretty and delicate and she is precious. She needs to be protected,” Dom adds. “She needs to be someone in the world with absolute protection from vampire kind, doesn’t she?”
The vampire is offering Anya his protection the only way he knows how. It is strange, but vampires are weird. Their bodies are dead and their rituals are bizarre. They act according to overly strict sets of arbitrary rules, because they don’t know how to live the way real things do.
Aside from her ridiculous outfit, Anya truly does seem unharmed. She has obviously been fed, and I don’t think she has been beaten. But I will not know the full extent of the damage until I have her safe at home.
“What is the point of this, vampire?”
I do not know why I am bothering to ask. Those who have no hearts do not know love. They only know power. So this is a power game. All of this from the beginning has been about this creature’s need to dominate and control.
“You have not been in the mood or mind to listen for quite some time, Alexei. You needed to learn that I am capable of taking away everything you hold dear. The rising is not to be ignored. Vampire numbers are about to increase seven-fold. Blood will run in the streets. The last time this happened, the packs were almost entirely hunted to extinction. I, believe it or not, am trying to save you from your own arrogance.”
“What do you get out of this?”
“When you live as long as I have, you take pleasure in gardening.”
“What?”
“I watch over several familial lines, descending from people I once knew and loved. Including yours, Alexei. I knew your great-great-great-grandfather. I knew his mate as well. I have had a hand in protecting your pack for as long as it has existed. You were known to me when you were still in the womb.”
I feel Anya tremble in my arms. The creature thinks he is benevolent, but he was made by a dark curse and that means malevolence flows in his veins.
“Please,” Anya whispers almost inaudibly. “We have to get out of here.”
I am sure the vampire can hear her very well, but he pretends not to.
I hold her a little tighter. It is just she and I, and we are surrounded by vampires. I should have stopped to think before I came. I should have brought the pack—or should I? Perhaps that would have only served to lead all of us to the slaughter.
“I am always going to know where she is. What she is thinking. How she is feeling. I am aware of her in ways nobody else ever could be aware of her,” the vampire says. “I could make her my thrall, my puppet, my pet, my slave. Do you understand, Alexei? I leave her enough free will to say and think things like that so she remains amusing to me. That is what the gods do, is it not? Create entities with just enough self-determination to be of interest?”
Of course he has a god complex. Living forever will do that to you.
I know when I am in the presence of a dangerous creature, and there is nothing more dangerous in this world than this vampire. An ancient megalomaniac with nothing to lose and everything to gain. He could snuff out our line in an instant if he so chose.
He acts like a patriarch, but I sense his cruelty keenly. Whatever interest he has in our line, it is not benign.
“I cannot wait to see what young she bears you, Alexei. You were a beautiful baby.”
He has forgotten something. A true god is a creator. Dom is not a creator. He is an infective agent, a curse crawling on the planet’s face. He will never know the embrace of true eternity. He will be standing on the world when it ends.
For a moment, I feel sorry for him. He, like all of us, is lost in a search for meaning, and it is harder for him because everything is ephemeral. Even the very vampire progeny he makes are taken from him. Anya wounded him when she killed his son. He is demonstrating that pain now, showing us a fraction of it.
“What do you say, Alexei?”
I clear my throat, and lean into his metaphor.
“Men are not great because they are made by gods. They are great because they exist in spite of their capricious cruelties.”
There is a brief pause in which he does not respond, then there is a smirk and a nod of acknowledgement.
“You’re not going to submit, are you?” He says the words thoughtfully and perhaps even sadly, as if he is being forced to confront a reality he does not want to deal with.
“No. I am not.”
“Then I am afraid neither one of you can ever leave this place. You are a liability to yourselves and to the… Aaargghhhgghh!”
We never hear the end of his little speech, because the room bursts into a kind of light that forces both Anya and me to close our eyes to avoid having them burned out.
This is a weapon that the pack has been developing. Giving us time to work before letting us know where Anya was turns out to have been a significant tactical error. We have not all been sitting around waiting. Many of my pack are incredibly intelligent, and with an aim to turn their intellect toward, they have become rather dangerous.
Vampires do not like sunlight. Ancient vampires can tolerate it, but what just exploded in this room contains enough UV to kill a hundred of them in a single explosion. It’s designed to incapacitate, and it does so brutally.
Dom is screaming. I imagine thousands of years have passed since he last felt pain. By the sound of it, he’s finding it very unpleasant. That’s likely because his skin has melted off, his eyeballs have bubbled away to nothing. He cannot see and he is a shambling mass of bare, dead flesh rotting visibly.
“You will all perish for this!”
His cry of furious rage heralds not our deaths, but the arrival of the pack.
They were behind me. Of course they were.
And they are no longer on defense.
The sounds of vampires dying echo through the concrete walls, mixing with the blind rage of Dom, the ancient who imagined we had entirely failed to evolve.
“Anya,” I say. “Do what you do.”
I drop Anya, and in an instant her dress is shredded as she takes her wolf form.
She is the one wolf among us capable of biting whoever she wishes. She has already taken in the curse. I want her agile. I want her able to defend herself. And I want her to do all the damage she needs to do in order to work off the rage she has accumulated.
We kill, the two of us. I have my weapon, and she has her teeth. Bright ultraviolet bursts accompany a cacophony of undead demise as the pack finally hunts the way it was designed to.
We eradicate every single vampire in the building, with the exception of Dom. He will take more killing, and I have no desire to put him out of his misery just yet. He has made us suffer, and he will suffer too.
When we are done, she shifts back into her human form, all her naked, beautiful, soft female glory. I wrap my arms around her, pick her up and kiss her deeply, properly, the way I can now that we have taken our vengeance the way we need to.
The pack is around us, two dozen heavily armed wolves ready to do harm to anyone who might so much as wish us ill. We have battled our natural enemies tonight, and we have won. Our superior weaponry and reinforced armor have ensured that we’ve not lost a single wolf. It is a decisive victory, one that will be remembered in our history for generations to come.
“Time to take you home,” I tell her.
She shakes her head, looking at me with a surprisingly solemn gaze.
“There’s more,” she says. “Downstairs. Can’t you smell them?”
“Vampires?”
She shakes her head. “Not vampires. They’ve been…” She draws in a deep breath. “This place is bad, Alexei. Really, really bad. I’m not the only one they took.”