Drawing Down the Mist

by Sheri Lewis Wohl

  “Spit it out.” She was in a hurry, though she didn’t really want to share why. To blurt out that she needed to find sustenance would be akin to a fox jumping into a pen of rabbits. For the time being, she would keep that secret to herself.

  “Dee was getting too close to uncovering information they didn’t want exposed. Something in her research triggered an alarm, and voilà. She was on their radar.”

  “A trigger.” It was actually a great theory, something she or her techs would think to do if on a case. In fact, they had.

  “It’s what I would do,” Rodney said. “Put in a tracker. Make sure I know what’s going on at all times. Somebody gets too close”—he snapped his fingers—“bye-bye.”

  Sasha turned back to Dee. “What did you uncover? Tell me exactly what you did and quickly.”

  “Well, if some asshat hadn’t destroyed my home, I could show you.”

  “Asshat. I like that phrase. You don’t seem all that upset about losing your home. I’m as angry as I’ve ever been about my business. Of course it was more than my business. It was also my home. The whole thing has me seeing red.”

  A shadow crossed Dee’s face. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m angry, but I’m more scared. I mean, I’m not used to people who go to that kind of extreme just because I hit a nerve. I’ve dealt with lots of people in my career, and plenty of them were just horrible human beings. But horrible enough to try to destroy me, not so much, and that scares the daylights out of me.”

  It had been a long time since Sasha had felt anything even remotely like fear, so it was hard for her to relate. She wanted to tear someone’s throat out, not hide from them. “We should go to your home and see if anything is viable.”

  Dee shook her head. “No.”

  “Don’t you want to see what was done?” She knew exactly what they’d done to her, was there when it happened, and that personal look gave her more motive to do it right back. She wanted to find each and every one responsible and rip their heads off.

  Dee nodded slowly. “I do, and at some point I’m going to have to see it with my own eyes to make it real. Right at the moment, I’m clinging to a bit of denial. I’ve had too many surprises tonight, you included. I don’t want to stand in front of what used to be my life and see a big, charred pile of ash.”

  Sasha finally smiled. She liked that she was a surprise to this beautiful woman. It hit her as she looked into her deep, dark eyes that in another time and place, she’d like to be a lot more than a surprise to her.

  ***

  It was still hard for Dee to really grasp that the woman in front of her was a vampire. Seriously, she looked like any attractive woman she might meet through mutual friends. Maybe a little paler than some, but some folks just weren’t sun worshippers. What struck her the most: how beautiful she was. Despite the depiction of them in popular culture, vampires weren’t beautiful, were they? They were mean and ugly and evil. A creature one wanted to stay a great distance away from.

  Nothing about Sasha screamed mean or evil, blood-soaked clothing aside, and she sure as heck wasn’t ugly. Far from it. She looked like she could hold her own in about any fight yet had a softness about her that the hard shell didn’t quite hide. Or the black leather. My, oh, my, was that enticing. She reminded her of someone from a kick-ass vampire ninja movie…Wait, was that even a thing? If it wasn’t, it should be, because Sasha could totally pull it off. If she ever got back to that vampire book she was planning to write, her protagonist would definitely be a kickass ninja vampire dressed all in leather with long, thick hair and mesmerizing eyes.

  Dee’s breath caught in her throat as the thought of pulling off all that leather jumped unbidden into her mind. With a ferocity that came out of nowhere, she suddenly wanted to see what was beneath all that toughness. Like right now.

  “Knock it off” went through her mind just as quickly. Bigger fish to fry than satisfying a sudden hormonal itch, and honestly, that’s what it had to be. The biggest fish in that frying pan was where she was going to live now that her house appeared to be a giant mound of torched kindling. If not for the genius of the cloud, she’d be wiped out. A fan of new and fancy technology, she’d been quick to establish her cloud backups. Plus, they allowed her to work anywhere, anytime. Sure, she heard all the naysayers and their predictions of theft via the cloud, but it was worth the risk. It made her life much easier.

  Now it made her loss less damaging. Her works were safe, and even though she’d lost personal possessions, she still had what was most important: her stories. Too bad she’d failed to back up her most recent research on the vampires. She’d meant to but got so caught up in what she was finding, combined with Prima’s promise to show her how it was all real, that she’d neglected that one final step. Everything she’d found had been saved in a nicely labeled folder on her hard drive. Now it was all gone.

  Her eyes met Sasha’s, and she was struck again by their depth. This woman—and it was difficult to think of her as anything else—was like a river. Smooth as glass on top, while deep and full of currents below. She would love to know what she was thinking about right now, because she was certain it was far more than the simple loss of her own property. She could almost see the wheels turning in her head, and she suspected plans were being made, organized, and a timetable for deployment established.

  “I don’t like that someone destroyed my home. I really don’t. At the same time, it’s just stuff. I can replace stuff.”

  Sparks appeared to flash in Sasha’s dark eyes. Now that was a trick she was sure had to be all vampire. “It is more than that, and no one has the right to take away another’s possessions.”

  Boy, she detected a whole lot of bitterness under her words. There was a story there, and nobody had to tell her the ending wasn’t a good one. Dee simply shrugged. Possessions were great and all, and yes, Sasha was right that no one had the right to take them away. Dee rationalized the loss a little differently. There were more important things in the world than a sofa or a jewelry box or even a treasured computer. She could make a life again without worrying about trinkets.

  She didn’t try to press the point with Sasha because Dee had the distinct impression this wasn’t the first time something enormous had happened to her. Even though to her this all felt like a blitz attack, Sasha’s take was clearly different, and with it came a personal affront. What had happened in her life that had her so attached to her belongings? That attachment didn’t make sense. If she truly was a vampire, then she had forever to replace anything she lost.

  Dee and Prima had become such good friends partially because they both valued the metaphysical over the physical. Though she might be reading it wrong, that didn’t appear to be the case with the beautiful vampire. What an interesting layer to an already interesting woman.

  Before either of them could go down that path, Rodney interrupted them. “Ladies, you might want to see this.”

  As she walked over to where Rodney sat in front of his bank of screens, Dee glanced at her fitness tracker, surprised to see that the night was almost gone. It was a quarter to four in the morning. How in the world had the night slipped by so quickly? And why wasn’t she even remotely tired? She was, after all, a woman who loved her sleep, and she hadn’t gotten a lot of it during the last twenty-four hours. There was going to be hell to pay later.

  Rodney leaned back in his chair. “Take a look. As my favorite uncle used to say, shit’s hitting the fan out there. It’s looking like a War of the Worlds movie.”

  “Book,” both Dee and Sasha said at the same time. A little flutter danced in Dee’s heart as they echoed each other. She adored a woman who knew her literature, or genre fiction if talking to a true bibliophile snob. Bottom line, if she knew the works of H.G. Wells, she was okay as far as Dee was concerned. This vampire thing was getting stranger and more interesting. Did they read novels? Had she read her novels? She liked the idea.

  A sudden thought stopped her. Was it more than simply knowing or readin
g the novel? She was a vampire, right? That’s what Prima had told her and Rodney had confirmed. She had totally accepted it as the truth probably before Sasha came back. So, was it possible that she’d done more than read the book? Had she actually known H.G. Wells? The idea fascinated her, and Dee wasn’t above asking. Well, perhaps not right now, but when the moment was right. How cool would it be if she could talk to someone who knew him?

  She shifted her gaze from Sasha’s profile to the bank of monitors. It took her a second before what she was seeing made sense. One monitor was still on her neighborhood, though now it had moved away from its focus on her house to the length of the street. Rodney appeared to be manipulating the cameras to try to get as much of a three-sixty view as possible.

  “I thought the cameras weren’t yours?”

  He didn’t look up. “Nope. But baby, I got skills. They try to outsmart me. They fail!”

  “You hacked them.”

  “Damn straight. Big Brother wants to watch all of us, I’m gonna watch right back.”

  This man was hard to dislike. He was handsome, smart, and funny. Yeah, his off-the-grid mentality had the flavor of an eccentric, but then again, didn’t they all have a touch of eccentricity? Returning her gaze to the screen, she studied the scene that filled it. Half a dozen unmoving forms lay stretched out on that familiar ribbon of asphalt. Her mind didn’t want to process what she was seeing, yet her strong character did.

  “This is live?” She didn’t want to believe it was. She knew it was.

  “It’s live.”

  Her stomach turned. Bodies, many of them, lay this way and that. Some in the street and some half on the sidewalk, half in the road. One shape in particular caught her attention, and after a second, it hit her why. Patrice Self, her neighbor two doors down and sometimes running partner, was on her back, her open eyes pointing toward the sky. Even if she’d been facedown, Dee would have known her. She’d recognize the spandex tights and yellow jacket anywhere. If she’d seen that outfit once, she’d seen it twenty times. Now her neighbor, her friend, was splayed on the asphalt, a dark stain on her chin. She didn’t want to consider what the stain might be.

  On another monitor, Rodney had pulled up the massive park in downtown Spokane. It was beautiful and had something for everyone. Art, nature, ice-skating, and a stunning view of the falls. Like her street, it was cluttered with bodies. The sick feeling in her stomach intensified. It took a lot of effort not to throw up.

  How could this be happening? What could take down Patrice and all the others? Rodney clicked through a series of screens, presumably all the cameras he’d hacked into, and each one displayed a similar picture. Place after place. Body after body. And, as they watched, the darkness punctuated by the tall streetlamps began to fade, and the true horror of what they were seeing came into clearer focus.

  “Was there some kind of dirty bomb?” It was the only thing she could think of to make sense out of what she was seeing. Not that she really understood what a dirty bomb was or what it could do.

  Rodney shook his head, and beside her she could feel the tension in Sasha’s body. It was like she was filled with electricity about to burst forth like lightning. Prima was standing next to her on her other side and holding her arm so tight Dee was pretty sure she’d have bruises in the exact shape of fingers once she let go.

  “No,” Rodney said, his voice thick and dark. He used his mouse to move the focus of one of the cameras in for a close-up of one of the unmoving bodies. “It’s something much worse.”

  ***

  Katrina felt the weight of fatigue bearing down on her shoulders. It was always like this. The higher the sun climbed in the sky, the harder the weariness pushed on her. When she was first turned, she had suffered as the newly turned often did. Hunger made her more animal than woman, and even a brush of sunlight on her skin caused excruciating pain. Her maker hadn’t taught her the ways of a vampire, so she’d had to discover them on her own.

  It still made her angry, even after all this time. She had been treated like trash, the whisper of death always in her ear. Many times it had been very close. Misery had been her closest companion. The nights of scratching and clawing to survive. The days of hiding so she could rest in peace. She’d done what she’d needed to, and her maker had gotten what she deserved. Katrina had been young and angry back then, and had acted rashly. It would have been better if she’d gone about it differently. Then again, it was a different time and place, and she’d acted the only way she felt she could. In the end, it had actually made her stronger and hungrier. That hunger had gotten her to where she was today, and that made it all worthwhile.

  Now, as she let the fatigue settle over her, she allowed her mind to wander back to that predawn morning when she’d been summoned to the great study where so many momentous decisions were made. Once more a familiar demand was made. For the first time ever, Katrina had refused. She smiled, remembering how it all went down. She did not offer her wrist for the slice of the knife that would leave yet another scar. She did not allow her blood to flow into the crystal goblet. Instead, she pulled her hair back and offered her neck.

  Invitation extended. Invitation accepted. Ninety minutes later, she was the only one left standing. She’d believed she’d won and was on top of the world.

  In some ways, as they say in these times, the joke was on her. She’d raced into the night, free at last and full of blood lust. Such wild abandon had nearly undone her. She had quickly discovered she had a great deal to learn and that bridges burned could never be rebuilt. Out on the streets, finding her way, she was alone and, though she would never admit it to anyone, lonely. Then it all changed. One time, one single time in all these years, she’d found another who filled her heart. She had believed she would no longer be alone, and this time, rather than turning away, she had made the ultimate decision to bestow upon her love the most precious of gifts. She expected gratitude. She didn’t get it.

  Her one true love had turned on her after she had shared with her the most precious thing she had. Worse than that, she’d abandoned Katrina. She’d been looking for her ever since. Now, she’d found her.

  In a way it was a fitting time for it to all come full circle. The Consortium that she now headed had been working for a very long time to make the world theirs. For thousands of years the vampires had been forced to hide in the shadows, to be something less than they were, and that was wrong. They were far superior to humans, and their rightful place was at the top of the hierarchy, not hiding in dark corners, not pretending.

  It was a beautiful thing to be in her seat right now, for their time had finally come, and it had begun this night. That it started with the one she had been seeking for nearly a century was the most fitting piece of all. She could hardly wait to see her face and the look in her eyes when she finally understood what was to happen to her. What Katrina was about to accomplish would make previous world conquests look like schoolyard reenactments. She was going to be the one they talked about and revered for thousands of years.

  Eli came into the room. “Katrina, you must rest.”

  He was right, of course. If her face looked anywhere close to his, it was true. His eyes were dim and his features tired. She shut the laptop and stood. “Everyone is in position.” She’d finally received communications from all the key players. The plans they’d made were falling into place like a complicated and beautiful thousand-piece puzzle. By the end of the week, she would no longer have to hide in a luxury hotel room. All would bow to her.

  She would bow to her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sasha fought against the physical weight of the drowsiness pushing at the back of her eyes and making her want to lie down and sleep right here. It didn’t matter that she was belowground and far away from the rays of the dawning sun. It didn’t matter that she still craved sustenance. Her body instinctively sensed that it was time to power down like a laptop. Even the oldest and most experienced of the vampires couldn’t indefinitely resi
st the draw. It became easier as they got older, but it never went away. Two things were inescapable: their need to rest during daylight hours and their need for human blood.

  The former had never really bothered Sasha. But the latter had taken her far more time to come to grips with. Once her new reality had sunk in, she’d attempted to make peace with it in her own way. She’d tried hard to sustain herself on animal blood. It was a colossal failure. Just the thought of what she’d gone through in those early days still made her shudder. She never wanted to be that sick again or to feel as though a thousand needles pierced her skin hour after hour. Even the gunshots ordered to end her mortal existence were less painful than the unsated hunger.

  The gunshots. It had been a very long time since she let herself think of that night in the dark basement with her family. She could still vividly recall the searing pain of the shots piercing her body. They should have killed her as they’d done to Mama, Papa, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Alexei. The entire Russian royal family rendered bloody and lifeless on a dirty basement floor. All except her. She’d wanted them to kill her, had begged to join them because going on alone was worse than the agony of the wounds caused by the bullets. Her fingers drifted to her shoulder where one of the scars was hidden beneath her shirt. The smell of her blood as it had dripped to the floor while the one she trusted as no other carried her from the room and away from everything she’d ever known was still with her. Her wishes had counted for squat. Her pleas for release unanswered. She shook her head and let go of the memories. She returned her focus to the present.

  Trickles of unease rippled through her, her body telling her it was not to be denied. Forgoing human blood was three times worse than the wounds that had bloodied the basement floor. Nothing had prepared her for what had happened when she attempted to deny what she had become. No amount of willpower could topple the hunger. Right now, she didn’t have a choice.