Night Kings: The Complete Anthology (11 page)

She waited for a response, but when none was
given, a look of disappointment washed over her face.

“Strike at me,” Aubrey bellowed as she beat
on her chest as if it were a drum. “Let the lady out so that I may
tear her from my son’s mind!”

She was the brains behind her husband’s rule
as pack master. There wasn’t a wolf in the county that would say
that aloud, but there wasn’t any that would argue its merit. It was
she who sent Bernhard out to bring her son back. He was the
strongest werewolf the pack had known in centuries, but he wasn’t
the wolf for this job.

Aubrey knew this, but she could not dishonor
her husband by refusing him the chance to set things right. She let
him go and let him fail. All so she could stand here at this
moment. She would bring her son back to them free of possession.
And if she didn’t it would be in a corpse she brought back.

“Do it!” she cried as the tears streamed down
her face. “I’m the only one standing between the two of you. Just
me! Strike me down and she’s yours forever!”

Lukas balled up his fists in rage, but when
he moved to hit his mother he found the anger had dissipated and
the blackened veins receded. With his head sunk low he dropped to
his knees and begged for an end to his suffering.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t do it.”

“No,” said Aubrey with a gentle hand atop her
son’s head. “You already have. You’re going to be all right, my
son.”

Lukas kneeled before his mother and sobbed
into his cupped hands. She stood beside him for emotional support,
but the tears streamed down her face as well. Together they wept in
the silent grove, but they were far from alone. There were others
in the forest and they swarmed from every angle.

Werewolves were born from the fiery pits of
Hell. That was many years ago and the once ghoulish lycan race
mixed with those they preyed upon. It was then the modern werewolf
was born; stronger, faster, and more ferocious than their hellish
brethren. The lycans never had a chance and were swiftly overthrown
by their younger selves. That was centuries ago and generation
after generation the werewolves evolved to suit the world
around.

Unlike their storied enemies, the undead
vampires, this new breed of monster was cursed to a mortal life. It
was seen as an inherent weakness for many years as the vampires
pushed them out of their territory. They came to learn that their
weakness was in fact an advantage that they held over their
aggressors. Overtime they broke their more basic, hellish instincts
and banded together to form packs.

Love, respect, pride; they were human
emotions and foreign to those of the nightmare realm. For those
shaped in hellish beginnings, emotions such as love were not born
naturally. They forced it upon themselves, for the werewolves saw
the true strength in the pack that ran together. Tonight the pack
would run once more.

A howl tore through the woods and then
another in the expanse of wood around them. Soon, dozens of howls
could be heard and they were no longer in the distance. It started
with the shadow of one wolf on the horizon and then it turned into
many. From all sides the wolves appeared with incisors bared and
eyes aflame with amber, and yet there was no anger in their hearts
for the atrocities that’d been committed. There was only love for
one that’d lost so much.

A flap of feathers in the night went
unnoticed by those on the ground. It signaled the end for one, but
the beginning for another. Lukas Wendish regained himself, his
pack, and he did so in the nick of time. Yet, his pack wouldn’t be
there to save him when the fires raged beyond control. That’s what
the raven saw on this night. It saw the beginning of the end for
the werewolf way of life.

Chapter Twenty

Night Kings: Sunkeeper

Gregory Blackman

Dust to Dust

It took hours for Sarah Matheson to lick the
blood from the floor, her person, and anywhere else her blood had
spilled from her once open wounds. She was far from full strength,
but her vision returned and the tremors that once gripped her had
eased to but a shake of her hands.

She could see better now, enough to see the
stone walls that closed her off from the world. There was a small
crack just above the foundation, but it was too small to escape
through, too dark too peer through. She was stuck here, for the
time being, until she could gather the strength to tear these
chains from her flesh.

An exhausted Sarah tumbled from her knees to
the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Built of a similar stone as
the walls, even if Sarah could see herself from these chains, she
wouldn’t get through the next obstacle in her path.

In the center of the ceiling there was a
large seal that separated the stone with a ring of steel. That’s
when it donned on the woman that perhaps there was a way out after
all. Inside the seal was carved a crescent moon symbol where three
chunks that would’ve made a full moon stood apart as if they’d
drifted off course from its larger half. It was a peculiar symbol,
not one she’d ever seen before, but one steeped in what appeared
ancient tradition.

The sun and moon have been a symbol for the
occult years prior to the aperture known now of the Hell Gate
underneath Vatican City. Mankind has feared the unknown since their
inception and in that time a great number of orders and
brotherhoods came into existence. For those that chose to walk a
path of nobility and honor it was the sun’s light that guided them.
Yet, it was the moon that called to those that wished to walk a
darker path. These men were the latter, learned in their subversive
ways, and not above being lowered to the dark depths of a monster
to catch their prey, and catch her these men did.

She laid there for some time as the
nothingness of her environment seeped through her cold skin. It
drove her to vengeful thoughts, not just of her captors, but of
those that had banished her to a life of misery. It wasn’t an
accursed cult that placed her in the dregs of Salem that night. It
was another. One she needed to be halfway out of her mind to
consider harm against.

Sarah Matheson was once of high standing in
the kindred community and had known a life of opulence that few
humans outside kings and queens were accustomed. It was Sarah’s
maker that extended her those luxuries, Cetra Petravic, a vampire
believed to be of the lady in red’s lineage.

It was in the lady’s company that Sarah
overhead mention of the vampire queen’s surname, a family name that
would prove dangerous had it gotten out in the world. When Sarah
was discovered to be in the next room over it meant the end of a
life she held so dear. She was in the wrong place at the wrong
time, but it mattered not, for the secret she’d uncovered could not
be unlearned.

She could die where she stood or flee and
clung to what little remained of her life. To the New World she
fled. A world inhabited by few of their kind at the time. A world
of infinite promise to one so far removed from the rest of her
kind. That’s what Sarah Matheson believed at the time. She couldn’t
have been more delusional.

It took nearly a century, but the lady in red
followed her overseas to the New World. This was
her
home
now and it would never be Sarah’s again. She drifted from city to
city in constant fear of what may lurk in the shadows. Little did
Sarah know she’d stumbled upon the lady in red’s nest; the one
who’s name must never be said.

It was at that moment the half crazed vampire
realized how she’d get back at one infinitely more capable than
she. When she escaped from this cell, all would know of the lady’s
dark secret. That was how she would harm her vampire queen. She
would do it from afar and let the crow’s come to feast.

Sarah Matheson found her last vestige of
strength and wrapped her spindly fingers around her chains. She
pulled with all her might, but her might wasn’t enough and she
pulled to ill effect for some time before she succumbed to fatigue.
She needed fresh blood.

“It won’t work,” said the voice that had
spoken to her earlier. “I know what you’re doing and it won’t work.
You’re not breaking yourself from those chains and yet you insist
on keeping me from my sleep. How many times must you attempt an
unattainable feat?”

“Until they break,” she affirmed without
hesitation, “and your neck lay drenched in your own blood.”

“Then you will die in vain.”

“Bullshit,” she replied.

“I tried for far longer than you’ll ever
have.”

Sarah looked over to the crack in the wall,
and asked, “What does that mean?”

She waited for a response, but instead got a
return of the shuffled sounds of a man at the ends of his life.
Still, she hadn’t ruled out that he was an invention of her
blood-starved imagination. Stranger things have known to happen for
those denied their blood cravings. There were the tremors and
blackouts, bloodlust, and visions of life on the other side of the
Hell Gate.

“We share a reason for being in this place,”
he said, “and it’s not because of a dead reaper. That is but the
show, the spectacle, the guise in which these men operate.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Sarah
asked.

“Because it’s too late,” he said softly.
“We’re both dead.”

“Get real,” she said. “You can rot away and
die if you want. I’m getting out of here and feasting on those that
dishonored me with their mere touch.”

“Aw, now here I thought you were a smart
girl,” said the man from behind the hole in the wall. “Don’t you
feel that,
girl
? The sun rises overhead.”

“I can wait a few more hours,” Sarah said
without cause for immediate concern. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

She didn’t know his name or the circumstances
that led to his capture. She could barely make sense of hers. Yet,
there was one thing Sarah Matheson had come to learn since her
awakening in this cell. That was the sound of her dark stranger’s
hoarse laughter throughout her cramped confines. It must’ve taken
all the man had left to give, but he belted out laughter in what he
maintained was the end of times for them.

Sarah could hardly hear the sound of gears
grinding overtop the ornery mirth from her next door neighbor, but
it was there and it became all the more apparent when the crescent
moon above began to spin in a counter clockwise fashion.

“What the hell are they doing?” a panicked
Sarah Matheson asked. “I’ll tell them anything they want to know!
I’ll tell them the lady’s n—.”

Sunlight burst into the stone cell and set
fire to both Sarah and her unknown counterpart. Only these weren’t
the sunbeams she knew in her second life. These were a concentrated
burst of light that seeped through her skin, all the way to her
rotten core. She writhed on the ground in a contorted and perverse
manner while cries for help went unanswered. All the while the
man’s laughter filled her room. Until the moment they both turned
to ash.

No one came for them. Neither their captors
nor any that called themselves friend. They were lost to the world;
ancient relics that had long since passed their date of expiration.
There would be no bereavement on their behalf. No burial rights.
Only those that would soon uncover not just their charred remains,
but a world beneath them they’d never believed possible.

Chapter Twenty One

Night Kings: Dayside

Gregory Blackman

Divergent Paths

It was a breezy autumn night in the coastal
town of Genoa, as peaceful a place one could find in war torn
Italy, a country only seven years removed from the Hell Gate
incident. Despite the trauma inflicted upon the land, Genoa
maintained prominence among the many counts and dukes that warred
on all sides.

On the outskirts of town, a lady dressed in
red sat atop one of the many rolling hills that lined the
landscape. She waited for a man she knew well. What she didn’t know
was that he wouldn’t be coming on this fateful night; wouldn’t be
coming on any other night. Yet, the lady was far from alone
tonight.

The lady was born Xenia Alva to an Italian
fisherman, nobody of importance, but he was not the young woman’s
birth father. That was a truth she would learn much later in life.
Behind Xenia stood a man born of blood and hellfire with hair as
black as his silhouette that crept into her view.

A startled Xenia looked to see what lurked
behind, but as she turned her head the man was already upon
her.

The man’s teeth sunk into her throat and with
a buckle of her knees she was swooped into his arms. Cain was that
monster’s name, the first nosferatu to take human form, and creator
of the vampire race. To Cain she would be his queen, the first
their kind would have, the one to bring them beyond the darkness in
which they were born.

“You know not how special you are,” whispered
Cain into the lady’s ear as he feasted on her neck. “Allow me to
show you…”

And show her the man did. Cain showed his
lady in red a world she could never have fathomed and between them
thousands were turned into the now-prevalent vampire race. And yet
it wasn’t until the death of her maker that Xenia learned of what
Cain meant all those years ago. She was more than the daughter of a
simple fisherman and if her secret were to escape in the world it’d
be a world no longer welcome to her.

For over 500 years the lady wept for her
fallen maker. Those tears saw entire towns and counties razed in
her name. Commanded by an undead legion of vampires and their
ghoulish offspring, the vampires brought even the mightiest of
enemies, the Holy Roman Empire, to their knees in surrender.

That was before the Order of the Reapers and
their combined assault on the holdings of the vampire queen.
Xenia’s empire crumbled overnight and her vampires along with it.
It took the lady in red centuries to start anew while she
languished to the shadows. That was many years ago and still the
pain haunted her. Still, it tore at her from the inside. The lady
in red had every reason to kill the reaper that auspicious night in
Salem. She’d killed her fair share. Yet, she wasn’t the one whom
had done the deed.