Night Kings: The Complete Anthology (5 page)

“You’ve done enough,” Gemma interrupted. “We
don’t need your assistance any longer.”

Gemma Kohl could be as forceful as any man.
Elsa had seen it a number of times, not least being their first
encounter, but never before did Elsa believe her friend capable of
transcending otherworldly boundaries to force a monster such as
this to bend to her will.

“Ah,” said Remus with a swift step backwards,
“but that is where you are mistaken, milady. You need more than
mere assistance if you care for that stilted friend of yours.”

“Speak.” Gemma took a step forward to show
her undead adversary she wasn’t afraid of him. “Then be gone.”

“Aren’t you the least bit curious who the
lady in red is?” he asked. “I know the young man is
dying
to
know.”

“He isn’t.”

“Not on your life or mine.”

“You bet I do.”

“Ah,” a brazen Remus said as he raised a
finger towards Lukas’ position, “of course he wants to know. He
can’t help himself.”

“Speak,” Gemma repeated with another step
forward. “Speak your peace and then be gone, for you’re not the
only one that should be feared.”

“The lady’s my maker,” said Remus, “and she’s
coming for
him
. She won’t stop coming for
him
until
she’s got what she wants.”

“What does she want?” Lukas asked.

He jumped to his feet in excitement and
almost took a step closer before he realized the circumstance he
was in. He wasn’t afraid of Remus Castalon, and although he had
every reason to be at the moment, Lukas knew that if the battle was
on his terms the man in black would be the one with fear in his
heart.

“That
is
the question,” Remus
said.

“Tell me!” Lukas demanded.

The lady’s hold on him might’ve been shaken
in the scuffle with Elsa, but still Lukas called to her, in his
mind, with hopes that she would return. Well, she returned and
brought an army of ghouls with her, ghouls meant to maim and kill.
And still Lukas called for her, his lady in red, for salvation.

“That’s what I mean to uncover,” Remus
answered.

“Well,” said Gemma with another step in the
wrong direction, “you’re not going to uncover it here.”

“It’s not often we disagree, Gem,” said Lukas
with a low rumble in his belly. “Now isn’t one of those times.”

Everyone in the room waited, even the ominous
man in black, for Elsa to add her two cents. She’d done it on every
other occasion and there was no reason for her to stop now.

Elsa didn’t have the wherewithal to process
everything that’d happened over the course of one night. Ghouls, a
man with what appeared the teeth of a great white shark, and now
something he referred to as a maker. She could make snide remark
after snide remark, but it wouldn’t mask the truth forever.

She was in way over her head. She didn’t know
of these monsters before tonight because she was never meant know.
This wasn’t her world.

“As you wish,” the man in black said as he
took one final bow and slowly backed against the wall. “It was
under regretful circumstances this meeting took place. I make no
reservations to the contrary and yet I look forward to the night we
are all together again.”

With a maniacal laughter the man in black
fell back into the shadows of his own accord, past the heaps of
bodies that lay in his wake, to a place between light and darkness.
He did more than blend with the shadows; Remus became one with them
and disappeared into the blackness. All the while his guttural
laughter could be heard throughout the Kohl home.

Between the blood and the mirth of her faded
caller, something snapped inside the young Elsa Dukane. Her world
would not be the same ever again. She understood that now. At least
in that regard she stood ahead of the rest of Salem’s citizens.

Elsa looked at the two people she thought she
knew better than any. What she believed to be true turned out to be
a preconceived notion of friendships that might’ve never existed in
the first place. In this moment she was alone. Perhaps it’d been
that way from the start.

Elsa balled up her fists and turned back to
face her supposed friends with a furor they’d rarely seen from the
wide-eyed adventurer. She’d asked politely. Now she would get to
the truth—the real truth—the one that hid in the shadows yet
existed everywhere at the same time.

“I don’t believe it!” she screamed at the top
of her lungs. “What the hell are you people?”

Lukas Wendish and Gemma Kohl slowly looked
towards one another and then turned back to their bewildered
friend. “What do you mean,” they asked in unison, “
you
people
?”

Chapter Eight

Night Kings: The Raven Watches

Gregory Blackman

Behind Dead Eyes

The Festival of the Moon had come and gone in
Salem. Most of its citizens had walked blissfully away from
Blackrose Manor that night, unaware of the predators that lurked
behind every nook, every statue, and every shadow of the
otherworldly home of the Castalon family.

Lukas accompanied two of his oldest friends
to the festivities, but it was the mysterious lady in red that
captured his heart and his imagination. Little did he know then,
but he’d fallen under her spell and would remain as such until he’d
found the strength to purge his inner demons. It was a tall task
for most men. Near impossible for those such as Lukas Wendish.

It’d been days since that night and still the
lady lingered in his mind. He found himself in a place few in Salem
frequented. That place was the Night’s End, a bar off the map of
normal society, built along a road one traveled only when one
wished to become lost. Only Lukas wasn’t lost. He knew damn well
where he was.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked. He was
a monstrous man with arms as thick as his neck and an apparent
temper to match. He narrowed his focus and leaned in closer for a
better look.

Lukas had never been more afraid in his life
and instantly regretted the decision to come here. If these men
figured out what lay beneath the surface the Night’s End would
become an entirely different scene. Lukas thought so intensely to
keep his composure that he’d overlooked the bartender’s question, a
bartender that now looked back at him with menacing eyes

“You blind, deaf, or dumb, boy?” asked the
bartender. “What’ll it be? I won’t be asking again.”

“Whatever you’ve got on draft,” Lukas
answered softly. He was unsure whether he’d ordered the correct
drink, but it prompted a response from the bartender and he took it
as good a sign he could’ve hoped for. He still had his head.

Lukas was underage, but the Night’s End
wasn’t a bar known to card those that entered. There were a few
faces in the bar at this moment that appeared under the age of
majority, but beyond their dead eyes lurked a predator older than
they appeared.

The bartender came back with a musty tankard
and offered it to Lukas, but it was promptly withdrawn when he
reached out to accept the drink without the proper coin in
hand.

“Not so fast,” the barkeep said to the
surprised young man before him. “That’ll be the standard.”

Lukas fumbled as he reached for his wallet
and looked up at the towering figure. “The standard would be…”

“The same as anywhere else in the state,”
said the bartender coldly. It’d become obvious that the
conversation wore on the man. He wasn’t interested in shooting the
breeze any longer than he had to.

“Uh…”

Being underage, Lukas hadn’t been afforded
many opportunities to purchase booze. So when it came to a
standard
price he hadn’t any idea what he was speaking of.
That was because there wasn’t such a thing in and the bartender
could see Lukas coming from a mile away. The bartender may not have
known exactly what Lukas was, but he knew the youngest of the
Wendish clan when he saw him.

“Look at that,” the man said, as he drew a
hand closer to Lukas’ opened wallet. “It’s precisely this much.
Wouldn’t you agree?”

The barkeep grabbed at Lukas’ wallet, seized
two of his bills, and waved it back in his face to make sure the
deal was acceptable to the beleaguered young man. A dejected Lukas
accepted the offer for he knew it would be the only one he would
get.

Lukas’ hand trembled as he grasped the
tankard he’d been handed. It could be anything that swirled inside
this pewter mug. He shuddered to think of the possibilities that
lay inside so he dove in lips first and let his taste buds
decide.

He was no connoisseur, but it was a
satisfying enough taste for his palate, and when he lowered the mug
from his mouth and wiped his frothy lips clean, Lukas hopes were
confirmed as he laid eyes on the golden brown ale he’d just
consumed. There wasn’t a drop of red anywhere to be seen.

For a brief moment the booze washed away all
sense of fear and self-doubt that clouded his mind. That feeling
lasted nowhere near as long as he’d hoped it would and soon he
returned to the frame of mind that’d brought him here in the first
place. He wanted to fight back, more than that he wanted to matter,
yet his experience with the unruly barkeep reminded him where he
stood in the world.

With eyes on the tankard pressed to his lips,
Lukas finished what remained of his drink while an undetected
shadow crept over the bar counter on route to the misplaced youth.
When he finally put down his mug and realized something stood
behind him, Lukas found the courage he sought and took the
opportunity to strike first against a would-be aggressor.

Lukas’ attempts at antagonism were ground to
a halt no sooner than he rolled his fingers into a fist. He blacked
out for a fraction of a second, just long enough to see him off
balance and down to the wooden floor. It brought upon him and his
dark stranger the attention of all those that sat inside the
Night’s End. Lukas recognized that as he slowly dragged himself off
the floor and back to his barstool.

His gaze was slow to shift to the ominous
figure that’d so easily struck him down. If the man wanted him dead
it would have happened before he hit the floor. Only it wasn’t a
man that’d halted Lukas.

It was Gemma Kohl and she’d come to bring her
misbegotten friend home. There were a dozen eyes on Gemma, but she
didn’t cringe from the spotlight, she owned it and everything it
touched. A wave of her hands saw the other patrons back to their
drinks and out of her business.

“My apologies,” she said to the bartender
before he could reach for his weapon. “We’ll be out of here
immediately.”

And they were. Gemma wasted no time as she
taught her friend a valuable lesson in humility. She kicked Lukas’
butt out the front door and to the ground where he rolled on the
dirt.

“How’d you find me?” Lukas asked. “I haven’t
exactly made it easy.”

“No,” she said, “you haven’t.”

Gemma Kohl wasn’t the type to risk exposure
at the hands of her most immortal of enemies. That was before one
of her friends decided to walk into a nest of them in hopes of
knowledge that might just kill him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Gemma asked
with hands on her waist. “Visiting a known vampire bar? Are you
kidding me?”

Her ashen skin glistened in the fresh night
sky and forced Lukas to refocus on the single presence in front of
him. He hadn’t drunk nearly enough to feel as he did. It was the
darkness inside, the lady in red, and she clawed at him from
within.

“That’s none of your business!” Lukas roared
as he dropped to the dirt and clutched at his head in an unseemly
fashion. He was in agony, irate at the world, even more so in
himself, and no matter how hard he tried to shut himself away the
lady wouldn’t hear of it.

“You want to find
her
,” said Gemma,
“don’t you?”

“Don’t lecture me.” Lukas pushed off from the
ground and took a forceful posture towards his once complacent
friend. He would fight her to the last word, he would fight himself
if need be, all for the lady in red that haunted his fractured
mind.

“You’re still possessed,” said Gemma, “and it
only gets harder from this point on. You need to be strong, son of
Bernhard, for this darkness takes deepest root in those of your
kind.”

“Wait a minute, wait just a bloody minute,”
Lukas said as he began to pace back and forth through the empty
parking lot. “You don’t have a car… we’re miles from Salem and you
don’t have a friggin’ car. How the hell did you get here?”

“You’re attempt to change the subject only
proves you walk on shaky ground,” Gemma said. “Even the lady you so
desperately cling to can see that plain as day.”

“Do I?” argued Lukas, of less than sound mind
and ready to lash out at all that kept him from his dark lady.
“What are you? You seem to know what everyone else in this town is,
but none of them dare speak ill of the Kohl family. Why is that?
What are you hiding, friend of mine?”

Gemma knew better than to show fear in the
face of the unnatural and took the same step forward she had with
the undead Remus Castalon. “That’s the monster in red speaking to
you. Do not become that man. Do not become
her
man.”

Gemma tried to reach out to Lukas, but he
would have none of it and shoved off any assistance.

“Don’t push me away,” Gemma warned.

“Get back!” cried Lukas as he clutched at his
stomach in agony. He turned back to Gemma with eyes bursting of
amber light and growled to the moon in sweet release. “I’m already
beyond your reach.”

The monster in Lukas was unlike those that
lurked inside the bar. He was in control of his demons until the
moment he wasn’t. It started with hair, golden as the stars that
lined the night sky, and muddied in the blood and flecks of flesh
that peeled off him as if it were a diseased part of him the
monster rejected. After that followed the crack of bones, too
numerous to count, and only matched in revulsion by the contortions
his body made while it happened.