Chapter 3
Sidney
Carlyle assigned me a team of three other slayers for the task of killing Ilyana Krudelbach. I scratched my neck as I scanned the mission brief. “Four slayers for one fledgling? She just turned twenty.”
He began to recite, “A man is but one cog…”
My fingers tightened on the parchment. I bit back the urge to finish the verse for him.
Again. Instead, I studied the sketched portrait of Ilyana Krudelbach: high cheekbones, small upturned nose, and the typical aristocratic features of her bloodline.
Young. Predictable. Exactly the type of mark I could handle alone.
Carlyle continued, “In the machinery of progress. We toil together, not for individual gain—”
“But to create innovation for the benefit of all.” The words tasted bitter. “Understood, sir.”
As he always seemed to, Carlyle got his way through the wisdom of our god.
After two days of tracking Ilyana’s movements, and more than a few heated arguments, my team pieced together a plan.
On the third day, we began execution. As I waited in a ditch in the dark of night, ears perked for the clop of hooves thudding on the packed dirt road, I simmered with irritation at Aetherius’s wisdom. It would’ve been more pleasant to take care of this on my own. Solitude was preferable to…this.
The shadows around us were rife with the scent of human fear, courtesy of the two men between Captain Darli Stark and me.
Because of my dirty blood, I could smell fear from yards away.
The scent made my mouth water, inevitably reminding me that I hadn’t shaken every monstrous impulse inherited from my vampire father.
“Even if she bites you,” I said to the more fearful of the two recruits, Reilly, with barely suppressed impatience.
“Odds are it will be dry. Vampires don’t want to inject venom into random humans.
It’s taboo to turn someone without a purpose.
Accidents happen, but a vampire has to be under serious stress or other strong emotions before they lose control of their venom ducts. ”
“Okay. Thanks, Doc,” he replied. Many new slayers wrongly assumed I was a fully trained doctor. They’d never had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Hillman, who’d had the patience to answer endless mundane questions.
I would be nervous too, if I were him. By some cruel design, men were easier to turn than women.
The transformation of a woman required intent and planning.
For men, all they needed was an injection of fresh venom.
Every time a male vampire slayer set out on a mission, he took a risk of not returning.
“What if she is?” His hands shook. “Stressed. Or…highly aroused. I am dangerously appealing, after all.”
I stifled a chuckle, hiding it with a sigh. “Accidental turnings are statistical anomalies.” I felt compelled to add, “You’d know that if this wasn’t your first mission, recruit.”
“It’s my second, actually,” Reilly corrected. I rolled my eyes. Any of my remaining goodwill for him dried up. “What if she’s not hungry tonight?” It was his fifteenth what-if in the last two hours.
Neither his captain nor I wasted breath on reassuring him again, leaving Dustyn to answer. “Then we come back tomorrow,” the other man whispered. He hadn’t allowed fear to enter his voice or make his body tremble.
I’d liked my first impression of Dustyn, so I’d given him a placebo before we’d set out tonight. The odds were in our favor for this mission, four against one. If Ilyana tried to sink her fangs into him, I’d push him out of the way.
Reilly, on the other hand, had my latest and last prototype in his veins.
I hoped it worked if the moment came, but it no longer occupied my priorities.
I needed to focus on the cure, not waste any more time with a preventative.
But the other slayers held the delusion I still worked on improving it.
He’d asked, “What if I get bitten tonight?” moments after receiving the shot.
“We’ll see,” I’d answered shortly.
Hopefully you receive a sizable dose of venom. If the prototype holds, you’ll fail to sprout fangs, I had wanted to say. Failure would still expose the variables I needed. And I intended to record every physiological change to archive for later.
But I already knew how most slayers talked about me when they thought I was holed away with my experiments. Since I kept to myself, I seemed standoffish and rude to them. I merely preferred the solitude of research and the euphoria of discovery to small talk.
If only Ilyana Krudelbach wasn’t late. Then we could stop whining over hypotheticals.
Once a day in the last two nights, she’d treated a visit to the outskirts of the Harmony borough like an excursion, taking a fine carriage from her family’s lavish manor.
She’d disappeared into the underground from there, and we hadn’t followed her.
Specialized dens served vampires who had the coin, delivering pleasures and debaucheries so that the wealthiest monsters barely had to lift a finger to acquire their prey.
Slayers didn’t attempt to police the underground. There were too few of us as it was.
The most logical time for Ilyana to be replaced was en route to her feeding sessions.
I spun my engagement ring with my thumb while the moments passed and the road remained empty.
This pampered fang-child wouldn’t require much effort to slay once we pried her from her carriage.
Sight unseen, I already knew she deserved everything she was about to receive.
Functionally, a monster was a monster, but a Born vampire had an evil essence nurtured within them from the cradle.
It made them worse than the Turned, arrogant and egotistical, the types to enjoy tormenting servants to their absolute breaking points.
The Turned, at least sometimes, remembered what it was like to be human.
A Born vampire didn’t have such limitations.
A horse whinnied in the night as a carriage emerged from the shadowed tree line, signaled by a star of light from a coachman’s lantern. Captain Stark raised her hand when Reilly made an ugly gasp. “Hold,” she ordered.
She turned toward me, which caused the men to do the same. I squinted against the glare cast by the light, trying to make out the details that set Ilyana’s carriage apart. Identifying it was a precaution so that we didn’t pick a fight with the wrong vampires.
I’d taken the time to memorize the particular gilded marks in the carriage’s wooden paneling. It was also drawn by the same team of four horses, each with coats as white as pristine snow. “It’s hers,” I confirmed.
“All right. As we practiced,” Captain Stark said.
We’d commandeered an old wagon and hid it within the grassy shadows of the ditch. It required both men to push behind it for the wheels to find purchase up into the path of the carriage. I braced the front to stop it from rolling to the other side of the road.
Any other day, a team of slayers would stop the carriage by sabotaging its wheels. But that wouldn’t do today. The plan relied on the Krudelbach vampires and servants not noticing anything amiss with how “Ilyana” returned home.
As soon as his lantern caught the outline of our temporary obstruction, the coachman called into the night, “Whoa. Whoa there.”
The team of four horses slowed, to a cacophony of snorting, neighing, and clattering hooves. They maneuvered around the wagon at a walking pace.
Captain Stark stepped into their way, sword drawn. “Halt!” The well-trained beasts stopped, and the carriage rolled to teeter with one polished wheel hanging off the road.
We’d dressed in the dirty rags of brigands, but Captain Stark fit them well, her figure dense with muscle and coated in fighting scars.
The scarf concealing the bottom half of her face also hid dozens of bite marks littering her neck and shoulders.
Whether they’d been acquired as souvenirs of missions completed or from a life before the temple was anyone’s guess.
“Surrender yer valuables, and we won’t skewer ya,” she said, affecting a lazy drawl.
“Brigands? Damn fools.” The coachman turned from Captain Stark to the shadows that Reilly, Dustyn, and I made just outside the halo of his lantern.
We’d drawn crossbows. Dustyn aimed his weapon at the coachman, while Reilly and I were poised to shoot at the door of the carriage from two different angles.
Captain Stark had deliberately left a golden symbol of Aetherius visible on her belt.
It was large and clean, catching the light on the backdrop of washed-out rags and her dirt-smeared, pale skin.
Beside it hung a small bag of coins, positioned so the man couldn’t miss the unspoken offer she carried.
“Wait. That looks like… Are you…” He drifted off with a gasp, then stilled when Dustyn came close enough for him to see the crossbow pointed at him.
The carriage’s door opened by an inch, preceding an aristocratic voice steeped in entitlement. “Why have we stopped? I specifi—”
Reilly flinched. Crash! His crossbow bolt whistled through the tiny window. Dustyn lowered his weapon to whip toward him, mouth gaping in disbelief.
“Idiot,” I hissed under my breath.
No scent of vampire blood permeated the air. Ilyana emerged from the teetering carriage, her heeled shoes immaculate on the dirt path. Her nostrils flared. I shot at her while her attention shifted toward a trembling Reilly.
In a split second, she lunged out of the way and grabbed his shoulder. Terror would make his blood as sweet as honey to her enhanced senses.
Captain Stark cursed and charged. The edge of her sword caught the lantern light while she rushed toward them.