by Damon Kinney
Taking Terrance’s hand, I led him down the hall toward the bedroom.
Adrian
Magnus left video instructions for me on an iPad that Listelle handed to me when I arrived at Roissy airport in Paris. It was in a leather satchel, along with my fake passport and ten thousand US dollars in cash. From that point on, it was just me and the pilot, a German named Horst who wasn’t a vampire, but who certainly realized he was employed by one. He told me how to activate the inner set of window shades that would almost entirely block out the sun, which was useful since the rays would hit us once it peaked over the horizon once we gained altitude.
After I plunged myself into sufficient darkness, I fired up the iPad.
The first thing I saw upon loading the video was Magnus’s craggy face. He was at least twice my age, and I was born in 1267. I recognized his office, which I’d been to once around the time of the French Revolution—the second one. I was amazed at how little it had changed since then. As for Magnus, his eyes were still bright and that gravelly voice as haunting as ever.
“Adrian, I hope this message finds you well. I apologize for any interruption this has caused, but you know our mission is of the highest priority.”
He held up a picture of a young woman walking down the street, obviously taken without her knowledge.
“This is Sagan Rafferty, the human Terrance Delacroix somehow impregnated. She is now his fiancée, and as we discussed, she is carrying his seed in her.”
She was quite lovely, and it was easy to see why Terrance wanted to have sex with her. Why he’d want anything to do with her beyond fucking or sustenance was beyond me. Humans were inferior creatures by nature.
Magnus continued. “A werewolf works at a blood bank in the town of Diablo Falls, four hours northwest of Denver. He overheard the human discussing her pregnancy with another woman and thought it suspicious enough to tell his boss—who, as luck would have it, is the cousin of Simon Ramsey. Simon gave me a call immediately upon hearing the news.”
I knew Simon well from my years in Stuttgart. We were about the same age and joined Tiras Asinis the same decade.
Magnus’s voice drew me back to the video.
“…in the nearly two millennia I have been on this planet, there have only been eight vampire-human pregnancies that I was aware of. The first was when I was a young man, and that child, Aadya, grew to be more powerful than any supernatural. My father took it upon himself to put an end to her reign. Afterward, he founded Tiras Asinis to ensure it would never happen again. Seven times since then we have successfully terminated a demon before it could use its powers, usually before it took its first breath.”
I’d heard this story more times than I could count over the centuries, but I didn’t fast forward out of respect for Magnus.
“We are once again faced with that peril and cannot allow this mixed-blood creature to live. On this device, you will find a folder containing a map to Diablo Falls, the city in which the human lives. Also included are her home and work addresses, and the address of the rental home in which she’s been spending time with Delacroix.”
He concluded the video with a warning. “Proceed with caution, Adrian. Simon Ramsey’s cousin claims this Diablo Falls is a hotbed of supernatural activity. And I imagine Delacroix would be a formidable opponent. Best to avoid him. Get into town, quietly do your job, and leave quickly. Send word the moment she’s been eliminated. Benediximus.”
I chuckled. I couldn’t remember the last time I was wished good luck in Latin.
I decided to catch a little sleep. I would have a long night ahead of me once I landed.
I pulled the rental Mercedes out of the parking lot and into the Denver night. It was a sleek, black automobile, quite beautiful. On the other hand, despite it being new and clean, it smelled of human. Maybe that was a good thing, I thought, as it would prepare me for the task at hand.
Driving in America was never something I particularly enjoyed doing, but once I passed the Denver city limits and traffic began to ease, it wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered. Driving in New York City—now there was something I never cared to do again. And regardless of how stressful modern-day highways and roads were, this still beat the fuck out of traveling by horseback over roads thick with mud and shit.
The jet lag hadn’t quite hit me yet, but I knew it would at some point. With any luck, I could get to this Diablo Falls place and do my job, then make it back to Paris before my system knew what was going on.
About half an hour outside of Denver, I felt a strange sensation. The feeling came on rapidly, built to a crescendo, then faded just as quickly as it had come. The entire experience lasted no more than twenty seconds, but I knew without a doubt what it was I’d just experienced.
A very powerful vampire had been nearby, probably in a car I’d passed along the road.
Terrance
What the holy fuck was that?
My entire body shivered, so much so that I was temporarily distracted from driving and the Corvette nearly went off the road.
I knew a vampire tremor when I felt one. The question was: What would a vampire powerful enough to have that strong of an aura be doing out there in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Denver?
The tremor was over nearly as quickly as it started, and I was left wondering.
And yes, I said Corvette. Just my luck, it was the only car available at the rental lot in Diablo Falls. As someone who drives nothing but Ferraris, that piece of Detroit garbage had gotten on my nerves from the moment I started the engine. It was crude and tasteless, unrefined. I relished the thought of dropping it off at the rental lot and never needing to sit in one of them ever again.
When I reached Denver, I headed straight for the Anderson Academic Commons. It was already nearly ten, and the place closed at two in the morning. I would feed afterward. As I approached, an ambulance passed with its sirens blaring.
Caleb!
I had told him to stop by when his shift ended at 4 a.m., and there was no way I could make it home by then. I pulled into the University of Denver and followed the signs to Anderson Academic Commons. As soon as I’d parked, I fired off a text to Caleb. As expected, the text didn’t go through. I tried to call the ambulance dispatcher, but that didn’t go through, either. How the hell did anything ever get accomplished in that damn town? I set my text up to auto-resend every half hour until it went through, then made my way to the research library.
Inside, I managed to dig deep into the Vatican data vault, using an account I found on the dark web. Since the Kindred never maintained any kind of research data of their own, I went to the next best place. For centuries the Vatican has kept files on the supernatural. They also seemed a little too interested in all kinds of “immoral” sex. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn that those guys just liked reading about all the sex others were having.
Unfortunately, I got no closer to knowing what would happen if I turned Sagan while she was still pregnant. I was aware that this was a needle-in-a-haystack quest, since over the centuries. Since the Tiras Asinis had seen fit to kill off human women who been impregnated by vampires, there were no reports that matched our unique situation. In the three instances where the women had lived long enough to give birth, they were all still human. None had been turned, including Aadya’s mother.
It was beginning to look like Sagan and I would have to err on the side of caution.
Then I saw something that jolted me.
The Vatican data vault had a report from April 2007 of a Hungarian woman who had been murdered in cold blood, and several people in her small village claimed it was God’s retribution for her having sex with a vampire. Her killer was never caught, but the thing that caught my eye was an autopsy report saying she was two months pregnant.
That told me that not only was Tiras Asinis still around, they were still actively trying to snuff out women carrying vampire/human offspring.
Like Sagan.
I rushed out of the bui
lding to my car and was en route back to Diablo Falls within minutes, abandoning all plans of feeding for the time being. I drove as fast as possible, using my Waze app to let me know where cops were.
Halfway there by 2 a.m., I was forced to put gas in the car. I pulled into the next all-night truck stop, and as I was pumping the gas a truck driver approached me. He was a big dude with an American flag T-shirt.
“Nice ride,” he said, admiring the Corvette.
“It’s a piece of shit,” I replied.
He laughed as if I were crazy. “Whatever you say, buddy. This is the finest car Detroit has ever made.”
I was in no mood to chat. “America has always made shit cars.”
He bristled at the insult. “Where the fuck are you from, asshole?”
“No place you could find on a map with your IQ,” I said.
He glared at me, and I thought I would see steam pouring from his ears at any moment.
“Look, you fucking immigrant. I’m going to pump my gas, and by the time I’m done, you need to be gone back to whatever shithole country you crawled out of. If you’re still here, I swear to Jesus I’ll beat the holy fuck out of you and claim you tried to rob me.”
He never got that opportunity, but he would wake up in the cab of his truck with a dull headache, low blood pressure, and a newfound reticence to criticize other cultures.
I drove on toward Diablo Falls, fresh new blood coursing through my veins.
Sagan
I opened my eyes.
Was that a noise? Or was I dreaming?
I sat up in bed and turned on the lamp on the nightstand, straining to hear anything at all. An owl hooted nearby, then a coyote howled in the distance. Nothing else, though.
I waited, listening for at least five minutes.
Just as I was about to turn the lamp off and go back to sleep, I heard it again. It was coming from the great room and sounded like someone trying to open the front door.
My first thought was that Terrance had returned, but it was too early. I doubt he’d had time to make it to Denver and back, even in a Corvette. I opened the drawer of the nightstand looking for any kind of weapon, but there was nothing except magazines.
The sound abruptly stopped. My heart in my throat, I put on a robe and padded barefoot down the hallway. The house was still dark, and I couldn’t hear anything except crickets, sounding louder than usual. Then the owl again, also louder. What on earth was going on?
I neared the spot where the hallway spilled into the great room and felt a chill. When I rounded the corner, I saw why and stopped dead in my tracks.
The front door was wide open.
“Hello?” I said tentatively.
Could I have forgotten to shut it properly and the wind blew it open? It didn’t seem that windy outside. From across the room, I could see the driveway through the door and the only car there was my Honda.
I closed the distance to the door, my heart pounding, and quickly shut and locked it.
The house was eerily quiet and I could swear I heard the blood coursing through the veins in my head.
Knowing the landline didn’t work and my phone probably wouldn’t get a signal, especially way out here, I headed straight for the kitchen and grabbed a chef’s knife, the largest one in the rack. I was scared to death, but I remembered the wine cellar Terrance had showed me and decided I could barricade myself in there, where I’d be safe until he got back.
Thinking that maybe I was overreacting, I returned to the great room and took one last look out the front window. Nothing at all moved.
Then something did move, something very large. I couldn’t quite see it, but it seemed to be moving towards me.
In a horrifying instant, I realized I was seeing a reflection of something behind me. I spun around, knife at the ready, to see a large man in a trench coat right in front of me. Dark hair and eyes, razor stubble, his face etched with hatred.
I screamed as I thrust the knife at him, but his hand intercepted my forearm harshly, causing the knife to fall. It rattled on the tile floor as the intruder put his hands around my neck. He was really strong and lifted me off the ground, my feet dangling below. Then he allowed me to drop downward, stopping before I could touch the floor. I felt the vertebrae in my back pop and a sharp pain in my neck.
I tried to fight back, swinging my arms and legs at him. He lifted me up once more and paused. I knew my neck and spine couldn’t stand being jerked downward like that again. As my panic rose even higher, he instead released me and I fell crashing to the floor.
I heard another voice and from a prone position saw two men fighting, tumbling across the great room as they wrestled for dominance. My addled brain could tell the second man wasn’t Terrance, but I had no idea who had arrived just in time to rescue me.
The pair knocked over chairs and broke furnishings as they struggled, punching and grunting. Suddenly there were sirens outside and flashing lights through the windows. The intruder bolted in the opposite direction of the door, crashing through a plate glass window before vanishing into the dark of the night.
“Sagan!”
As he ran toward me, I recognized the man who saved me as Caleb, the EMT who had brought Terrance home the night I learned he was a vampire. Caleb was also a vampire. And I’m guessing the strong man he chased away was as well.
“Are you all right?”
“I… my neck hurts,” I said. “And my hand.”
Another uniformed man burst through the door, brandishing a gun.
“Someone was here, but he ran off when he heard the siren,” Caleb told the man, who I realized was a cop. Turning back to me, he said, “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
“Terrance will be coming home soon,” I told him.
“I’ll leave a note. We have to go now.”
Terrance
I pulled into the driveway of the vacation rental house and grabbed my bag from the Vette’s passenger seat. The energy and the power of that new blood still pumped in my veins. I thought it a shame that all creatures couldn’t feel this alive sometimes—draining the blood from a human was a perversely life-affirming act.
When I reached the door, I immediately sensed something was amiss. There were scratch marks in the wood near the lock that weren’t there when I left. I turned the knob and the door opened. Sagan knew better than to leave it unlocked.
When I stepped and flipped the light switch, I was greeted by a scene from a horror movie. The entire great room was trashed. Furniture, lamps and vases lay broken and shattered all over the floor. A cool breeze blew from the open front door through a giant hole in the opposite wall where a pane of glass was earlier.
“Sagan!” I shouted as I ran frantically to the bedroom. The bed was empty, no sign of her.
I screamed her name repeatedly as I ran from room to room, but there was no answer. When I reached the kitchen, I saw a sheet of paper with “Terrance” written in Sharpie across it. Flipping it over, I found a scribbled note.
Sagan is safe and seems unhurt.
Meet us at hospital emergency dept ASAP. Much to tell you.
Caleb
I flew down the country roads at obscene speeds, only slowly slightly when I reached town. Bursting through the doors of the hospital’s emergency ward, I startled a woman behind the triage desk.
“Was Sagan Rafferty brought here?” I demanded.
“Calm down, sir,” she replied indignantly. “They left you this.”
She handed me a note, also in Caleb’s handwriting.
“Sagan is fine, only bruises. Meet us at her apartment.”
Again I drove like a madman, screeching to a stop in front of the building. As I was exiting the car, a figure stepped out from the shadows and I instinctively adopted an attack posture.
“Whoa, Terrance. It’s me.” It was Caleb. Even in the dim light I could see his cheek was red and swollen.
“I have to see her.” I started to run past him toward the front door of the buildin
g, but he grabbed my bicep and spun me around.
“Terrance, wait. She’s with her friend Marcie and I’ve been on watch since we got her. Sagan is fine. Let me tell you what I know before you go in there.”
I took a breath and nodded. “Make it fast.”
Caleb said he’d been on his way to my house, as planned. Thank God he never got my messages.
When he got close, he saw a Mercedes parked on the road a short distance away. It was all by itself out there on that country road, not close to anything, and not even pulled over to the shoulder. Suspicious, he took a look and found nobody inside, but the hood was warm. He used the EMT two-way radio in his car to call a cop friend. “Michael’s one of us,” he assured me. The cop told him to wait there for him.
As he was waiting, Caleb heard a scream and immediately let the cop know there was an emergency, then rushed to the house. He ran inside to find a vampire holding Sagan, preparing to break her neck. He intervened and briefly wrestled with the guy. When the cop pulled into the driveway with his siren blaring, the intruder fled through the back window.
Still holding my arm, Caleb said, “I told Michael I would tend to Sagan and he should check that Mercedes. When he went to look, it was gone. Sagan has bruises on her neck and will be sore for a few days. Otherwise, she’s fine. Obviously, the experience rattled her.”
I thanked him profusely and he promised to keep guard while I went inside.
“No need,” I said. “I’ll stay here with her tonight.” Then I added, “I know who did this, and he’ll definitely try again soon.”
From Caleb’s description of the guy, I’m pretty sure it’s Adrian Tariq, one of Magnus’s trusted lieutenants.
Next time, I’ll be waiting for him.
Adrian