Chapter 1 Tess #3
That wasnotwhy she was here. She was here to rescue helpless “crossbreed” children from their awful and punishing prisons.
She needed to clean up, give herself an evening to rest, and then plunge right into her work the next day.
There was the stealth rescue stuff but more than that, there was the public side.
She was trying to get a meeting with the region’s Vampyren Council.
It was considered the proper channel for grievances and she didn’t expect much, but she’d heard the Council in this part of the country was beginning to give way on some things.
Vampyrens in general were beginning to… mellow, if that was the right word.
Perhaps it was because of the constant threat of the Lucian beginning to invade along the West coast.
Tess had seen a Lucian once. She tried to forget it.
She’d barely gotten away with her life. She preferred Vampyren to Lucian, any day.
They were tall and leanly muscled. They were much quieter than Vampyrens who were brutal but not exactly stealthy.
Lucian were just as brutal but you didn’t see them coming.
They were like wolves in the night. She had been traveling alone, hiking in Kentucky, after freeing another creche.
She heard a gust of wind behind her head and suddenly, there was a Lucian.
At first she thought it was just a tall, pale man.
But he’d brought with him a sense of dread and strange metallic smell.
He hadn’t said a word as he stared at her with empty, yellow eyes, the moonlight glimmering off his silvery but sallow skin.
Tess had turned to run when she’d realized it was one ofthose; one of those monsters people spoke about that were worse than Vampyren.
She turned to run, and he’d grabbed her, two fingers digging into her throat as one immovable arm held her fast. He would plunge his fingers right into her throat and rip it apart.
She’d known that was his intention as he’d pressed harder and harder.
He was going to crush her windpipe, and she was going to die slowly and painfully…
It had only been luck that had brought the Lucian’s companions out of the dark woods that night.
They made strange screeching sounds that didn’t sound quite like speech.
They didn’t appear to actually speak to each other at all.
He dropped her to the ground, and she’d fallen hard to her knees.
Then he’d walked away as she struggled to regain her breath, her knees bleeding where they’d hit the gravel.
None of them so much as looked back. She was one small woman and not even worth the trouble.
There was something terrifying about that too.
They were all ants to the Lucian. They were not even valuable as sources of food or breeding like they were to the Vampyren.
To the Lucian, humans were as dispensable as dirt.
“So where is this new creche where they took the children?” She said, sitting up straight.
Crystal snorted a laugh at that and Tess bristled but she saw Kal smile a little admiringly in her direction so that was something, she supposed. “How about we get you a shower and some clothes first?” Crystal said, taking a swallow of Coke. “Ease in. Then we’ll go over the map.”
“Very well,” Tess muttered.
“I think it’s really admirable, the work you do,” Kal said.
It sounded vaguely rehearsed but not disingenuous and it was enough to make both Mark and Crystal look at him in surprise like Tess was doing right now.
“It… I mean I was drafted into the invasion,” Kal sputtered.
If a Vampyren could blush, he might have.
“Like my brother here. But I never agreed with it. Never agreed with taking children away from their parents or forcing the human women to breed.” His mouth snapped shut, and he sat there, frowning into his lap as if he was embarrassed by his entire speech.
“He’s always been a free thinker,” Mark said, and Tess was sure he sounded impressed. He was looking at his brother like he admired him. “Never made it easy for him.”
Kal tittered at that, perking up a bit. “Hey, we’ve both always been free thinkers. I’m just...alittlemore evolved than you.”
There was an easing of tension between them suddenly.
Tess could feel it happening. Watching the two of them become easy with each other after not seeing each other in such a long time made Tess’s own heart ache for her siblings.
But this world was harsh for family reunions and they often didn’t have a happy ending after all.
“It’s happening you know,” Crystal said to Tess, in a kind of conspiratorial whisper as the brothers fell into their own private conversation about what they’d been up to since they’d seen each other last. It sounded like a lot of melancholy rehashes of battles and deaths.
Tess leaned on her hand and nodded at Crystal to go on, curious.
“I mean the Vampyren sort of… evolving? I think they’re more…
malleable than we originally thought. They’re impressionable to humans, you know?
I think their own world is very harsh, this planet is less so. They’re…”
“Mellowing out?” Tess said.