by R. B. Fields
No matter what she is, she is not an immortal. No hunter is.
Markula is crouched in the tall cattails at the far side of the pond, hidden in the reeds. Those who make it through our traps will have to cross him, then the water, before they get to Dawn. Markula should make short work of the ones that venture past him — he is a Warrior, a predator. They’ll never know he’s there until he’s made them prey.
If we’re lucky. If we’re right.
I look over. My love is watching me. I squeeze her hand, but once, then she’s gone, walking away from the house and out into the pale circle of moonlight beside the pond with her shoulders square, her fingertips poised above her blade.
The fish roll over one another, splashing, as if they are marking her as a target.
29
Dawn
I’m going to die, but at least I got epically laid beforehand. If there’s enough of me left to bury, I hope they put that on my tombstone.
I think I hear Silas chuckle, but his voice is swallowed up by the wind and the gentle lapping of the water, then the more aggressive slapping of fins. A dove swoops over the pond — gray with silver-tipped wings. It vanishes into the tree line as if it senses the energy in the air and is frightened by it, but just the presence of the bird makes my skin crawl. I swear it feels like the dove is watching me from somewhere in the shadows.
Birds? Fucking birds? That’s the thing I’m worried about? As if a vampire won’t do more fucking damage.
The path to the pond feels longer than it did just yesterday, the water more oppressive as if I might be the one to drown there. They say that vampires hate the water, but I have no idea why that might be true. It seems a silly thing to be that terrified of. Can’t they just race over the bottom until they get to shore? Sluggish or no, they have super-speed, don’t they?
I know I’m trying to think about other things, any other things, so I don’t have to ponder what’s coming, but I don’t have long to wait. Beyond the pond, beside the pasture, the trees rustle. The first vampire emerges.
My blood runs cold.
He’s a hideous beast of a thing, his back twisted like one of his shoulders might have been dislocated in the past and never healed right; still half an acre from me, but I can see his giant snaggletoothed grin. He doesn’t appear to see me, though; his eyes are on the driveway off to my right. I clear my throat — he stops. His eyes meet mine. He changes course and heads my direction instead.
Stay still. Wait. This is the best chance we have. I’m screaming it at myself, but every muscle in my entire body is screaming louder, every instinct I have begging me to turn away, to run. Electricity zings up my spine and slams into my brain. Run, goddammit, run you fucking lovesick moron! You’re such a goddamn pushover!
This time, the voice sounds like my mother’s, and she yells at me more loudly when I register the other creatures that follow the first vamp from the woods — at least twenty sneaking from the trees at the back of the moonlit pasture.
No, not twenty. Shit.
Thirty of them at least, all of them horribly, inexplicably ugly, as horrifying as my group is beautiful, their faces craggy and creased. They lope toward me with long, casual strides, and Silas’s words run through my head — they’ll be feeding on my energy as much as my flesh.
They want my fear.
I wish I could avoid giving it to them, but my mouth has gone dry. What was I thinking? Mere days ago, I was single, chasing the occasional serial killer and calling in the cops to do the hard lifting. Now I’m in the middle of goddamn Vermont staring a pasture full of vampires in the fangs. It had seemed like the only choice.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should run.
The lead vampire’s tongue slips between his teeth as if he’s tasting the air, tasting my terror. And then I hear Silas near the trees, but only in my head — Now.
I back up, one step, then another. Please work; this has to work. The vampires break into a run, tearing across the pasture at warp speed — after me, after me — flying through the space between the trees.
And that’s when Silas makes his move. He snaps the lines taut, six thin strips of razor wire fashioned to a board he holds in his hands and attached to the tree on the other side of the pond. Wire — they can thank Mikael for that idea. And they can thank me for the blood they painted on each one.
The vampire in the front, the one with the long, straggly teeth, keeps running — his legs do anyway. One wire hits him across the belly.
His eyes widen as if shocked, but he cannot stay in denial for long, not with the black mass of organs spilling from the space beneath his ribs, blood and tissue pouring from the rupture that used to be a throat. The wires emerge from his body at his back, clean through his spine. Dripping. His abdomen appears to float in midair for a fraction of a second, then collapses to the earth on top of his severed legs. His head falls last, a look of deadly surprise still painted on his horrible features.
He is not the only one. All along the front line, vampires fall, their legs freed from the rest of their torsos, their faces torn in two. It’s working — my blood has made them vulnerable. And though they do not have beating hearts, though they should not be able to shroud the world in red, droplets of crimson paint the atmosphere. Red is the only color I see — even the moon appears to be filled with blood.
Some of them have managed to avoid decapitation — they crawl, their black, dead entrails dragging along the ground. One vampire, a beast with a glowing bald head and a large divot above one ear, drags his useless legs behind him, his thighs reduced to slashed strings of tendon and muscle, one severed bone a jagged spike three inches above where his kneecap should be. Something about him is … familiar. I’ve seen him before.
But I don’t have time to consider where. Silas bursts from his hiding place in a flash of silver, taking his machete to one vamp’s neck after another in a grisly symphony of blade on bone. From the trees, a pack emerges, long, sleek fawn-colored cats — mountain lions. I didn’t even know they lived in these mountains, or perhaps it had just not occurred to me, but I’m glad for it, and even more thankful that Markula has them at his beck and call. They leap for the standing vamps — the monsters still fifteen strong — clamping leg and limb and horrible head with their feline jaws.
The vamps cry out, one long collective howl, and scatter, some of them running for the trees beyond the pastures, some of them seeming to give up, collapsing as the cats tear at their throats. It seemed impossible just an hour ago, but … our plan worked.
We’re going to win.
Then I see them — the second wave. Vampires slink toward us from the fields like a pack of wolves, but I’ve never seen a pack so large, no group of any creature so large except maybe a flock of birds. They move like birds, too, all of them striding at a uniform pace that matches the one in the front, a horrid skeleton in a greasy-looking T-shirt. This group is smarter than Silas gave them credit for — than any of us gave them credit for. And there are far too many to fight off.
My brain begins to whisper as it did the night I watched my mother be torn apart: I’m going to die.
The vampires reach the bloody razor wire and stop. They can go toward Silas with his machete and the lions, they can go straight ahead across the pond, through Markula, or they can trek through the cattails along the side opposite Silas, where Draynor waits with his own set of traps.
The head vampire meets my eyes — yellow, the color of bile, of liver failure. He motions to the others, sending some one direction, some the other, covering all routes. But it doesn’t really matter. We don’t have the numbers to defeat them.
And from the look in his horrible eyes, he won’t grant me the mercy of killing me quickly.
30
Kain
My muscles are tense with unmet desire — I can taste her. I can smell her.
I smell the blood of every animal in the woods around us. I hear the shuffling of vampire feet, the subtle singing of the wire, now c
oated in gore, the wet thwacking of decapitated vampires hitting the grass. I want to tear them to shreds.
She’s changing me, and not for the better. All the horrible aggression, the unchecked rage that came upon me at the moment I turned, that I believed to be gone until now, has come back a thousandfold.
What was left of the original vampire group has vanished, chased back up through the woods by the big cats, but I don’t think they’ll stay gone now that reinforcements have arrived. At least fifty vampires stare at us from across the pond. They cannot see Markula hiding in the cattails between them and the water, I’m almost positive they can’t, but they sense something is wrong. They know we will have more traps. They know there will be more animals.
We’ve lost the element of surprise.
But the vampire at the front of their pack does not seem bothered by what we might have planned. He nods at Dawn.
Ten vamps break from the group and run toward the water.
Markula does not hesitate. He leaps from the underbrush and snaps the first vampire in half, tossing the top half into the pond — the side with his head. It’s not deep enough that he won’t be able to climb out, dragging his insides with him, but the fish are on our side. And they are more vicious than they seem.
A second vampire leaps onto Markula’s back, but he shifts, ducks, and throws the enemy vamp toward his comrades. They come at him again. Markula tears at them, his arms lashed with claws and teeth — he sinks his fangs into the face of one vamp, tears the throat out of another, blood spurting into the sky. Markula roars as the rest descend — his shirt is ripped away to the bloody scars beneath, the ones he inflicts on himself each and every night. His penance for a lost love that no longer matters. Only one love matters now.
And she is alone, standing in the moonlight between the pond and the house with her blade held in her fist. Ready. A warrior. A hunter.
But she will be no match for the group that’s emerging from the trees, some of them with rats and raccoons still attached to their clothing, tiny teeth tearing at immortal calves. Oh no. While we were watching the vampires descend from the fields, Warriors were skirting the property and coming around from behind, all six of them enormous monsters like Markula.
What are they doing? We’re vastly outnumbered — they don’t need Warriors to kill us. And none of them are looking at us, not even at Markula; they’re all watching Dawn, just like the vamps across the water.
They aren’t here to kill us at all, I realize, though they will if we get in the way — they’re here to take her from us. They know what she is. Maybe they know more than we do.
One of the Warriors notices me standing in the shadow of the porch; he has brilliant red hair and eyes to match. He grins and crouches, only his head visible above the wall of brush, a tiger before an attack.
But I barely look at him. The other Warriors are fanning out, closer, closer, all of them focused on Dawn. She sees them coming and narrows her eyes as if she’s trying to keep them all in her sights, her hand wrapped around her blade. One Warrior steps forward, breaking from the rest — larger than even Markula, a beast of a hunter. His teeth are black in the moon, stained with the blood of who knows how many innocents.
I meet Dawn’s gaze for one brief, fleeting moment. To the end, my love. To the end.
But I cannot let the end be today.
The big vamp lunges, his teeth bared.
No! I run for her, screaming her name, my blood on fire with fury, my voice vibrating with a panic I’ve never before experienced, an all-consuming terror, and —
The world explodes around me in a vibrant rush of color. Not lightning, not even close — more like an earthquake that has come from the air itself, a violent pulsing that slams through the night like a shockwave. I cannot hear. I cannot see. But when the world comes back into focus …
Still. Utterly still.
For a moment, I think the field has emptied, that perhaps the sound has frightened them all off, but then I see the bodies. The earth is covered with them.
Markula lies in the cattails, another vampire beside him, enemy fangs locked in his beefy shoulder. Silas, too, is prone near the trees amidst a score of others, his face black with their blood, his fingers limp around the machete. I do not see Draynor, but I know he must be here. Is his body lying somewhere nearby, reduced to death? And I know it’s death — I smell it.
And I smell her. Dawn.
I close the distance between us in a heartbeat. The vamp who lunged at her lies motionless a few feet in front of her toes as if he froze mid-leap and dropped from the sky. His eyes stare, unseeing, at the grass.
Dawn’s eyes are closed.
I lift her into my arms, and she’s warm, she’s so warm. Her eyelids flutter.
Alive — she’s alive. My blood sings, throbbing in time to her heart. Her gaze meets mine. She draws a hand to my cheek.
I lower my lips to hers, the quiet a bit less ominous when our tongues are entwined, but she breaks the kiss just as quickly. I was consumed for only a moment, but in that span, the dead have started moving, the piles of flesh in the field writhing as if trying to merge into a singular being. I back toward the house, holding her tight to my chest, ready to defend her, ready to defend us both for as long as I am able against the hoards, but then I see Markula, shoving bodies aside, climbing from beneath an otherwise unmoving pile of flesh. Silas is right behind him, his hand to his head as if dazed. Draynor creeps from the cover of the trees, his face black with vampire blood.
The world is otherwise silent. Not a single bird.
Markula nods at me. Silas is grinning. Dawn is a wonderful living weight in my arms.
But I can’t look away from the pond.
All the fish are floating.
Vampire Prophecy:
“One will rise. And she will be forged of bone and flesh, a love like no other — inamorata. And she alone shall force the heavens wide. Then shall the race of vampire fall.”
31
Dawn
Morning dawns, but I’m not ready to get up. I pull the silk sheet over my face.
Silas smiles, his head between my legs. He’s cute with his hair tousled, flyaway strands sticking to the underside of the sheets, face pinked with the light that filters through the filmy crimson material. “You’ve come to join the dark side, eh? Those assholes up there aren’t nearly as fun to look at.”
Draynor chuckles, and his chest vibrates against my back; his fingers tighten on my ribs. He moves his hips, thrusting deep inside me, and Silas lowers his face between my legs once more, attacking me with his tongue. I close my eyes — the sheet slips off my face.
Markula rips the covers the rest of the way down and lowers his lips to my nipple. I go over in seconds, shuddering in Draynor’s arms. Markula keeps the suction, harder, harder, and Silas follows suit. Draynor moves his hips faster. I moan — it’s all I can do.
I’m waiting for the day this gets old, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Markula releases me with a popping sound, and I’m ready to yell at him, to draw him back to me, when the door bangs open. Kain flies in, bright eyes wide, a giant book in his hands.
“We’re busy,” Markula growls, but he’s smiling, looking at me with a mischievous glint in his brilliant red eyes. “Unless you finally want in.”
“I know what she is,” Kain sputters.
We all pause. Draynor eases himself from inside me and sits. Silas pulls his head from beneath the covers. Markula lowers his face to my breast, unperturbed by the man in the doorway. He snakes his fingers between my legs.
But I can’t relax. I can barely breathe as Kain says, “You’re not just a hunter. You’re the one — you can kill us all. Every vampire.” His nostrils flare. “They were never after us because of Mikael. They’re after us because of you.”
Get BEGRUDGED, the next book in the Born of Darkness series, HERE!
About the Author
R.B. Fields is a clinical therapist turned dark
reverse harem romance author and has never shied away from the multitude of ways couples can enhance their sexual experiences. She’d do a lot for a Klondike bar, but only for people who never tell her she looks prettier when she smiles or implies that she should “smile more” as if her main purpose in life is to be sexy for them. She’d frankly rather be eaten by a vampire…in every sense of that phrase. Grab your next read at www.rbfields.com!