Night Kings: The Complete Anthology

by Gregory Blackman

  The dark robed warlocks began to chant in their thick, native language. Victor was hardly in his right mind and couldn’t understand a word of what they sang, but the hymn these warlocks chanted was a battle song, of that he was certain. This was a call for blood, his blood, and it wouldn’t cease until he was opened up by each and every one of them.

  “We’re going to own this city.” Hans wore a proud smile on his face as he handed his ceremonial knife to the next brother in line. “We’re going to own your home, your holdings, all that makes you what you are; even your dearest daughter, whatever she is, will belong to us in due time. If she survives the night, that is. You of all people should know I can’t ensure the civility of my berserkers.”

  They knew nothing of the light inside him, the light inside his daughter, and if he died in their clutches his daughter would walk this would without knowing what she really is. It was a fate worse than death for their kind, for if her two halves didn’t become one, she would cease to be the warrior of light she was meant to be, and instead become a vessel for the void that haunted all their kind.

  He didn’t care about what happened to himself. There was a long list of sins attached to his name. Sins he knew would one day come back to haunt him. Those thoughts offered him little comfort when his daughter was somewhere out there, alone, and unaware of the dangers that dwelled within.

  The next warlock stabbed Victor in his right leg, black, blue, and an undead pink from the blood he lost. The dagger pressed against his shin blade and saw the bone fractured before he removed it to allow the next in line to take their turn. Victor had no tears left for his woes. He was broken, both physically and emotionally, and without a care in the world towards his own wellbeing. He made bed. Now he had to lay in it.

  With crushed spirits, he sunk his head low and accepted the many stabbings as karmic punishment for his lengthy list of foul deeds. It was a dark world he lived, one that required moral sacrifices to be made in order to quell the distrust that swirled around him. He wasn’t human, and although he’d traveled this world for over three millennia, Victor Dukane hadn’t managed to become one of them. He could only hope now that his daughter might find better luck, but it was a tall task to ask for one so young, confused of her origins.

  “Father.” a familiar voice whispered into his ear. “I see you, father. I don’t know why, but yours is the only face I see.”

  It was his daughter that communed with him, but she did so while not on this world. She was displaced from space and time, lost to the great divide amongst the cosmos. How she got there he hadn’t the slightest clue, but wherever she was, it was of great comfort to the battered father. Elsa found a safe haven.

  “Where are you?” she asked in trepidation of his response. “Where am I for that matter? It’s so cold here, so strange, and there’s nowhere for me to run. I’m alone, father, and I’m think… I think I’m in big trouble.”

  Her other sensed the dangers that loomed and took her from this world. It was a protective measure, one that could easily be misconstrued as abuse if one had no prior knowledge of their ways. Elsa would survive Salem’s day of reckoning. She would live on, somewhere, and sow new roots into the ground. She live her life in blissful ignorance of her origins until the moment her other conscious burned up the last of its light. Then it would be the darkness that found her; and not a soul on this planet would be able to escape her wrath.

  Victor couldn’t answer his daughter. He couldn’t depart to her any worldly wisdom that would lift her spirits in these dark hours. He could only grin and bear it while more punishment was supplied to him. The next warlock to the cross flashed a sinewy grin in Victor’s direction before he leapt into the air to stab at his prey. The knife found a place in between the traitor’s false ribs, and when the warlock landed he was met with the warm spatter of blood on his face.

  He exploded in a fiery passion that prompted him to smash his head against the first brother he came across. He leapt back into air several times in attempt to retrieve the sacramental knife. In his last attempt the warlock managed to grab hold of the knife long enough to snap one of the traitor’s ribs on his way down.

  The torment Victor Dukane was forced to endure brought a guttural whelp to the surface that, past his blood clotted throat, echoed throughout the remains of the sunken temple. Still the knife stayed lodged in his side.

  “Now, now, brothers,” a surprisingly calm and collected Hans Brackhaus said to his followers. “Tear him apart too quickly and it’s the brothers in the back of the line you’ll have to answer to.”

  Hans motioned for the largest of their brotherhood to step out of the line and approach. With an indifferent wave in the direction of the traitor he charged the paragon of meat and muscle with the task of the knife’s retrieval.

  “Puny monster,” the warlock said as the two of them met at eye level. “You’re as cowardly as you are frail.”

  The warlock drove the knife as deep into Victor’s frame as he could before he finally pulled the steel from its tender socket. He bellowed with laughter as he took another stab at his nailed up prey, but when he turned around to pass the knife to another he discovered the mayor had at last found his voice.

  Victor Dukane wouldn’t let his daughter become a vessel for the darkness. There was enough evil in the world when he got here; and to fan the fires any further would result in the destruction of this world. No different than his last. He broke through the blood lodged in his throat and cried out to his daughter in support.

  Elsa Dukane wouldn’t be alone in the world any longer. Not while her father still drew strength from the white beyond.

  His eyes burst into molten lava that spewed forth from his elevated position to the pews below. The cry that once carried with it the pains of his many hardships became a towered force that struck at the very foundations of the temple. The pews began to rock back and forth that saw the unseated crowds look to one another, each and every one of their brows furled in the same malcontent confusion.

  The roof of the nave started to collapse under the stress and the submerged portions of stone and rock crumbled to the ground. Warlocks everywhere shuffled from one side of the room to the other too avoid what fell from above, but not one of them thought to reach out and contain the outstretched hands of the blasphemer.

  These men had all the power in the world and still they couldn’t stop one man from bringing their house of cards down upon them.

  Maybe it was the damage done from all the artillery fire the temple took in the Revolutionary War; more than half the building crumbled to dust in those skirmishes and saw the rest of the structure on already shaky foundation to begin with.

  Or perhaps the mayor was aided by the goddess high above in one last attempt to cleanse the world of the horror she unleashed. It wouldn’t have been the first time their goddess had struck at the warlock race. Where she had been guided by benevolent intentions and passive responses in the past, perhaps now the goddess used this man to strike at them with a closed fist.

  The last possibility that ran through the minds of Hans Brackhaus and his associates was that Victor Dukane contained all of that power, himself. These men of Nordic descent didn’t need to know the true source of that power. They only needed to know the vessel for its might, and that vessel was strewn up before the entire assembly.

  “Shut him up!” barked Hans, but the frantic leader wouldn’t wait for another to take that action from the man most deserved of its reward. He pushed through the crowd with no thoughts on that stubby knife they’d used for the ceremony. He desired the swift judgment that the claymore his brother in the front carried, and when he reached the front he made the sword his in proper Viking fashion.

  Victor saw the glint of the moon flash across the large sword carried towards him and used it as a catalyst to push past the all of the guilt, the transgressions, the greed and the hate. The sins that kept him locked in this most unpropitious of places.

  “You force my h
and, brother!” Hans frothed at the lips, and with a weighty heave, raised the claymore high above his head. “We’ll meet again in the hell that waits for men such as you and me. There we shall finish our discourse as true equals…”

  Victor howled in anguish as he summoned the power to force his wrists through the spikes that kept his nailed to the cross, but he had little time before the raised sword crashed down upon his head. The louder Victor’s cries became the more incandescent his eyes grew, until not even he could see the blade inches from his head.

  The cross blew apart under the weight of the claymore, but when the light subsided, Victor Dukane’s remains weren’t among the flurry of splinters and hunks of wood. A lone raven stood in his place, a feather’s breadth from the sword that almost saw him cleaved in half.

  “Get the blasphemer!” Hans cried desperately, his sword wedged in the wood where it would be of no use.

  Loud cracks of thunder emanated from the temple’s floor where the warlocks hurled bolts of lightning in his direction. Their attempts only furthered the damage wrought upon the Sunkeeper Temple, and after more than a few bolts from below their arched sanctum crown came down on top of them. Victor narrowly avoided some of the debris that came down, and managed to use the gap it left behind to carve out a path of escape for himself.

  Victor broke from his cage, back to a world that accepted him through the good times and the bad. He couldn’t abandon that world in its hour of absolution. If her daughter was to know of their ways, she would learn so from a father she could look upon with a proud face and know the truth about her origins.

  It was the highest of Salem’s mountains that Victor emerged from, a height higher than he usually flew, but one that granted him true sight of the events that plagued Salem. He could see the forces Hans mentioned as they seeped into every suburban street. In their wake, flames spread from home to home, where displaced homeowners were either cut down or forced to flee with the crowds of likeminded citizens.

  Victor could aid them humans in the battle for Salem and see the evils he witnessed below never live past the night. What couldn’t be done was right the many wrongs of his past. He couldn’t take back the centuries on the run or the sacrifices he had to make. He couldn’t nurse Elsa back to childhood so she could revisit her other properly. All Victor had was the fight before him and where he stood on the line. This time it would be on the right side.

  With the prospect of sins duly paid off, Victor Dukane used his powerful wings to soar towards the swirled mass of black that descended upon his city. He would fight for his daughter in hope she might have the one thing on this world he never had—a home.

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Night Kings: Old World Cull

  Gregory Blackman

  Awakening

  The unknown girl awakened to an empty grove of mysterious origin. She didn’t how she came to this place, or why. She only knew it wasn’t of this world, or any other she had seen before.

  The dead forest she left behind was gone, now replaced by sights never before seen by human eyes. It was a distant land, one where trees of crimson snaked upwards to the twin suns that hung in the sky; fields of grass, a near perfect substitute for Kentucky bluegrass, seemed to stretch on for miles on end, and in the distance, golden snow capped peaks that spiraled up into the sky. She walked, and she walked, each step with her head affixed to the skies of gold, crimson and amber.

  A palace of light and crystal high in the sky caught her attention and forced her to search higher and higher to its inevitable end. The castle sat atop an overturned mountain, frozen in its inverted place, as if no force on this world could ever dislodge it from its grounds. She wasn’t sure if the inhabitants were human, supernatural, or if there was anyone inside, at all. They could be long gone from this world, their mighty structure left afloat for any population below to worship.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” she said to the forests of red that surrounded. “I bet moving in was a royal pain in the ass.”

  At the highest of the fortresses’ towers, past the clouds and the haze, she caught the sight of two suns that hung in the same blissful ignorance of this planet’s denizens. Wherever she was, whenever she was, she wasn’t where she needed to be. That path had been ripped from her by the passenger of light that refused to show its true self.

  Piece by piece the events that led to Elsa’s awakening began to return to her. She was locked in a cage, threatened with death, or worse, and forced to flee parts of her city engulfed in flames. When Elsa looked everywhere for her friends it was to her home she went in search of her father.

  He could be ill-tempered, heavy-handed, and an all around tyrant at times. In spite of those instances, Elsa could count on her father to have her back, through thick and thin, whether or not she wanted it. He would always be there. Yet, when Elsa arrived home she discovered her father had left the premises. His whereabouts were unknown to her, but she pressed on in search of her in the woods behind their home.

  Elsa found her father, but not in the manner she expected. It was in her loss of consciousness that she came to meet with Victor Dukane. Elsa could say little to him before she was ripped from her side, but the impression he left upon her said a great deal. He was afraid of those in his company and desperate to see his daughter far from this cursed land.

  “Great,” she said to no one but herself, “to top it off, I’m locked up in a personal Never Never Land of Hell. This isn’t Salem and it’s certainly not Kansas. So where did I go? How can I get back to my friends and family—?”

  A misplaced step almost saw her saw into stumble into a hole in the ground. She caught her balance in time, but nearly fell over a second time when she looked down into that fissure. The crack in the ground led way to a cavernous maw that went down and down for what appeared miles. It was almost farther than the eye could eye, but see she did after her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  It opened way to another world far in the distance, one littered with more trees of red fire and yet another sun to orbit both sides of the world in a perpetual daylight. This was a flat world she found herself in, a world theoretically impossible with what Elsa thought she knew of the universe. Wherever in the cosmos she was, it wasn’t a world she could stumble upon on her own. Someone brought her to this place, possibly her other, for reasons still unknown. Yet, when Elsa realized this it only aggravated her other’s frustration for this world, and all the ones beyond. No longer was theirs a symbiotic accord.

  “Who are you?” Elsa shouted to the skies above. “What do you want from me, huh? What the hell did I ever do to you?”

  If Elsa wasn’t being hunted by the supernatural races she was being thrown into cages or sent across the cosmos to worlds she never believed possible. It was enough to drive a girl to the darkest places of her psyche, to crack, break into a million pieces. Elsa stayed whole through the events, although she had yet to decide if that was for the best or not. She was lost to herself, her friends, and the emotions that threatened to swallow her; whole if they had to. Where she would end up was anyone’s guess but hers.

  “Whatever it is you’re trying to tell me, you’re going to have to speak up!” Elsa shouted with hands raised in anger to the suns above. “Do you hear me?”

  At the forefront of those emotions was fear and love; fear of the darkness that came to her home, and love for the one she had just discovered. Irritated by the feelings that festered, Elsa and her other stormed through the blue grass and trees of crimson, mindful of any more fissures. No matter how far Elsa went it wouldn’t be far enough. Her feelings would always be right there behind her. Whatever she’d felt for Lukas Wendish, they were emotions that stirred within her long before their tender moment on this night.

  She had always known where Lukas stood in her heart. He was second to none. Whatever her feelings were for the young werewolf, they were clouded behind years of friendship. Those feelings came to a head tonight, awoken for the first time after all these years, b
ut too late to see into fruition. Lukas was gone from her side, and if she didn’t do something soon, he might never be there again. She would wait, hope for the best while she prepared for the worst. When the flames had cooled off Salem, Lukas and she would have their moment together. In that she could only hope.

  “You mother fucker!” Elsa screamed at the top of her lungs. “I hope you get fucked by a blind werewolf, fuck!”

  She cursed, and cursed some more at the glistening suns that hung in the sky, and when she reached the next fissure, she bent over to do the same on the other one. Her angry wasn’t misplaced, it was thrown in every direction she could until she received word from the one that kept her here.

  “Watch,” said the breeze as it skirted around her ears, “and understand.”

  Elsa searched the forests of red behind her for the voice that’d spoke through the wind. Not a soul could be soon and soon Elsa had no once but to continue her journey forward.

  “Watch,” the voice repeated, “and you might understand.”

  Elsa didn’t know what the words meant, not truly, but she was overcome with the sudden need to calm herself. She’d been going off full steam for the latter part of an hour now that it was bound to catch up to her eventually. She crept forward until the weight of her own head became more than she could bear. She surrendered to the place where her other dwelled, overcome with a rush of emotion that forced her to the ground. She could hardly keep her eyes open from the pressure that built from behind.