“Piece of shit,” Lucas muttered and kicked a foot. The carcass shifted from the blow. “We can’t leave it here. Maybe we should drag it into a corner somewhere, cut it up and dispose of it in the canals.”
Anton stepped back, still gripped by a repugnance trying to squeeze the essence from him. Anton never felt this way around a deceased hybrid, and yet awareness amplified as if the air had become charged with electricity.
“Lucas,” Anton said. Can’t he feel it to? Anton’s body itched and he couldn’t shift his gaze from the older vampire.
“I’ll have to go back and get the saw—” Lucas began, and then stopped. Finally, the repulsion must have grabbed him too.
Two hybrids clambered over the ridge. They were already transformed; tortured humans shackled to the bestial form of a lycanthrope yet blessed with the agility of vampires. They headed for Lucas.
Lucas’s ivory face paled further in shocked surprise and the veteran Eliminator was stunned to motionless by the swiftness of the attack.
Anton leveled his HK and squeezed the trigger, the silencer popping blasts of air. One round caught a hybrid in the chest and it squealed as it slipped between the vampires and off the edge of the roof. Another bullet showered brain and bone fragments as it split the second crossbreed’s temple.
Gutters along the roof edge creaked and a foul odor infected the summer day as a pack of half-bloods pulled themselves onto the slates.
Anton’s bowels tightened in fear and he prayed to the Elders he would be able to find the courage to explain to Markus how his two most senior warriors had been ambushed by an uncouth horde of mongrels.
“Move!” Anton implored.
Three quick strides and the Eliminators leaped off the edge of Saint Mark’s Square onto residential rooftops in the San Marco district. Anton risked a quick glance behind as he steadied himself; about half a dozen hybrids loped past their dead comrade. They were naked but transformed, faces warped with twisted grins.
The route was tricky. Anton had to change direction with speed to avoid gaps between houses and jutting chimney’s protruding from scarlet slates. They picked their way towards the San Marco Basin. Vile snarls followed in their wake as the freaks gained ground. The crossbreeds were quicker, more agile, and Anton knew they had to make the meandering stretch of water and hide in its depths before the foul creatures tore them to pieces. Ahead lay La Dogana del Mar on the point of Dorsoduro, the old custom house’s bronze globe shimmering in the late morning sun. Tourists lingered outside the huge church to its right, and gondolas rode the crests of waves manufactured by bus-boats.
Movement caught Anton’s attention as more naked forms hauled themselves onto roofs to his left. How many are there? Despite being on the rooftops, he dared not fire; the shooting of innocents—even by crossfire—would be severely punishable within the coven. Sweat lacquered the shirt to his back, his grip loose and wet on the butt of his weapon. Sunlight seemed to find a way into his pores and scorch his skin from the inside: he longed for the relief of shadow. His undead heart hammered painfully against his ribs and baked air filled his lungs with uncomfortable warmth.
Anton heard a shout behind him, metal clanking against stone.
Teetering on the edge of a house, a solid street below, Anton turned in the direction of the sound. Lucas lay across the peak of a roof, his weapon out of reach, upturned in a gutter. The vampire’s sunglasses had slipped from his face and immortal blood stained tiles beneath his hands where skin had scraped when he fell. Lucas looked up. His eyes bulged and leaked crimson tears as sunlight blazed uncompromisingly upon them. Anton thought a hint of fear distorted the Eliminator’s features.
After six centuries, his war was over.
Anton didn’t hear the vampire’s words but he understood the request not to be foolish enough to try and save his fellow warrior.
Lucas stood as the first of the heathens came for him. The Eliminator grabbed the beast’s outstretched arms and twisted them. Bones snapped like dried wood and Lucas plunged fangs into the crossbreed’s neck, its squeal splitting the still air.
Anguish swarmed in Anton’s mind. Fangs pushed hard against his bottom lip and adrenaline flooded his ageless muscles. The tang of his own immobilizing venom dripped onto his tongue.
Fuck the consequences, he thought, leveled the HK, and emptied the magazine into the approaching horde.
The pack swarmed over Lucas in a vicious orgy. Blood erupted over the feeding beasts in billowing plumes.
Behind Anton, Vaporettas chugged on the Grand Canal, cameras captured the glorious architecture of the ancient city, and a low growl cut the heavy air. Anton turned from Lucas’s destruction as deformed hands hauled more hybrids onto the slanted roof of the building. Some had features more human than animal, others with faces distorted by long snouts and elongated fangs. Anton could tell those who carried a dominant lycanthropic gene. He detested those hybrids the most.
Anton reached to his belt for a fresh magazine but touched an empty pocket. It must have fallen during his mad dash across the rooftops.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Hybrids hauled themselves over the gutters, cutting him off from the Canal’s safe waters. Anton looked across the blue band of the Canal to the monumental church. Tourists had gathered, watching half-breeds scale the building’s face. Bringing the war into the realms of the mortal world would greatly endanger the coven, but at that moment Anton didn’t care. Gabriella was gone, he had seen the oldest, most experienced Eliminator ripped asunder like a fox under the onslaught of a pack of hounds, and filthy heathen’s intent on his own demise surrounded him.
Anton ran.
A roar of excitement rose from the animals as they gave chase. Anton took the battle away from the Grand Canal; hurdling chimney’s and gaps between houses. He leaped over the Rio S Moise canal and stuttered to a stop. Four clothed hybrids stood before him in human form. Dressed in black suits, sunglasses shielded their eyes.
“Your kind are failing, Anton.”
Anton wondered how the impure creature knew his name. He heard the familiar snap of cartridges loaded into cylinders.
“I’ve seen others like you dying at my feet and I feel no pity,” the hybrid continued. “You think your race can dominate us? You can’t dominate what is superior to you.”
Sunlight glinted off the hardened steel of their Berettas.
Anton’s nails split his digits, sharpening into claws as he coveted close combat with the cursed new breed. Disgust tightened his stomach into a ball of hate. “It is you that are dying; you and your entire breed.”
The crossbreed laughed. “The Chosen are taking over. We’ll take what is rightfully ours and banish your kind for eternity.”
The pack gathered behind Anton. He would rather face the tarnished shells of hybrid weapons than their putrid claws and fangs.
Knowing his magazine was empty, Anton raised his firearm.
Smoke spat from their silencers, the August day punctuated by hushed blasts. Hot lead burrowed into his body and tore the inside of his chest cavity. One cracked his forehead: slicing through brain tissue, it took a large chunk of skull as it exited.
Midday air wrapped him as the impact pushed him off the edge. Wind buffeted his body, eyes stinging as he gazed at the sun as he fell. The surface of the canal felt solid as he slammed into it, the azure water pulling him into its mass. He sank into a tumult of bubbles.
Centuries of immortal combat played before his eyes: the first battles in the cobbled streets of Eastern Europe, slaying lycanthropes with swords and the talons of his bare hands. Shoulder to shoulder with Lucas as the conflict spread and modernized, hunting werewolves in the bombed streets of Berlin as the human world tried to rebuild their own destruction. The new war; stalking crossbreeds across the world, battles above and below ground, fallen comrades swept aside by a new wave of impurity.
Lucas; gone forever. Gabriella; whose body he could no longer save and who would now be pulled apart
by an autopsy knife.
Anton prayed to the mortal God that Markus would prevail and the tide could be turned.
His lungs shrank, deflating until they used up every molecule of oxygen. He hit the bottom. Anton gave up trying to find extra air and instinctively opened his mouth. Water cascaded into his lungs.
A face seemed to form, one he recognized, as if the final air exiting his body had grouped together to produce a spectral countenance. He knew his mind only showed him what he desired to see one last time, but he still felt a stab of loneliness when Gabriella’s ethereal face dispersed on an undercurrent.
The shadow of a passing gondola drifted across his face, and Anton hoped the canal would hide him long enough for his body to repair itself.
Calmness spread over him and the Eliminator waited.
MONSTERS AND MORTALS
BOOK II of the Blood War Trilogy OUT NOW!
http://bookgoodies.com/a/B00EGLLJOU
Rome: a city two thousand years in the making, once the most influential metropolis in the world. Mortal rulers have come and gone, great kingdoms built and destroyed. Yet one empire has outlasted them all, and the largest, most powerful vampire coven in the world has its roots buried deep in Rome’s foundations.
Disgraced medical examiner Fabio Morani travels there, following a trail of dead bodies left behind by a vampire. Deanna Matthews flees from hybrids—a grotesque half-breed mix of vampire and werewolf—and boards the first plane leaving Heathrow, bound for the Italian capital. A chance meeting throws the two mortals together and they find themselves embroiled in a centuries-old supernatural conflict, where the participants are hell-bent on their destruction.
Rome’s vampire coven is out for revenge, and nothing will stand in the way of justice.
EXCERPT FROM MONSTERS AND MORTALS
EIGHT
Vigeland Sculpture Park,
The Frogner Park,
Oslo, Norway
They hunted in pairs yet with a combined effort.
Six vampires pressed down from the north, moving swiftly across the park’s width. Four others waited at the south-western perimeter, ensuring their prey couldn’t escape. Ten vampires tracking two mortals seemed a little overkill, but Markus’s orders had been clear and Anton had never been one to disobey the command of such an honored Elder.
A three-quarter moon peeked around the jagged edge of altostratus clouds but failed to offer much illumination. It played in the vampire’s favor; Anton didn’t need light to determine his surroundings yet knew the mortals were running almost blind. The park spread before him as a field of light gray with the darkened outlines of trees, uniform and straight, lining the pathways. Directly ahead stood the park’s bronze fountain; visible as a deeper shadow in the night even from this distance. Its statues of babies and skeletons cradled in trees resembled forlorn ghosts against the backdrop of an overcast sky.
So far, the chase was going well.
To his right, in the distance, two local Norwegian vampires stalked the open space, their movement swift but not rushed. He glanced left and picked out the silhouettes of Raphael and Gino, the two vampires progressing at a similar determined pace. Paolo stayed close, on his right hand side and a little behind.
Markus had hand-picked the four Eliminators for this task, and within half an hour of receiving the telephone call they’d utilized the Elders’ private jet to fly direct to the Norwegian capital. Markus himself wanted to personally oversee the hunt but with his wife flying in that very night from Romania the weight of this important crusade rested on Anton’s shoulders.
He relished the opportunity but knew that this time they didn’t dare fail.
So far their contacts had proven valuable. The couple had been followed since early afternoon after they’d dined at a well-known restaurant, and the trailing vampire had been discreet enough that the mortal’s hadn’t suspected a thing. Within a half hour of landing at Gardermoen airport, Anton and the three Eliminators under his command traveled into Oslo for the rendezvous with their Norwegian counterparts.
During the summer, night creeps slowly across Norway, and even this far south it doesn’t fully become night until closer to midnight. An ominous dusk had accompanied Anton and his men when they swooped onto the last known location of the Italian and his female companion. The couple had tried to seek shelter in the gardens of a block of flats in the Majorstua district but for whatever reason they’d already left the scene. It wasn’t hard to pick up the trail again: a summer wind whispered through the Scandinavian metropolis and carried the scent of many mortals to the vampire’s senses. The stench of Fabio Morani was easy to detect: Mediterranean, unwashed, and aglow with panic.
Anton deployed the troops at his disposal quickly, and the trap had been set. Little did the mortals know they were being corralled towards the waiting vampires at the park’s southern perimeter.
The breeze seemed stronger here in the park, the absence of buildings allowing nature more freedom of expression. The vampires moved in silence, the only sound drifting to his ears being the murmur of foliage in the bough’s of trees and the panicked hiss of fleeing mortals.
Anton couldn’t contain his sly grin any longer. Yes; the chase is going very well, indeed.
The wind changed direction and the mortal scent was gone. Anton stopped; standing motionless next to a tree by one of the park’s many pathways. He glanced to his right; noticed that Paolo had ceased his forward motion too. The vampire remained twenty paces to Anton’s right and slightly behind, his pale face strident against the gloom and his dark attire. Anton’s eyes scanned the park; the fountain closer now but still just a darkened outline in the gloom. Further to his right, the monolith stretched towards the cover of summer cloud. Silence prevailed in the park. The sound of the mortal’s hurried escape no longer reached his ears. Can they sense a change in the wind too? To Anton it felt like a portent; a harbinger of bad events.
The wind returned but brought with it an intense odor that flooded his senses and sent adrenalin surging through his undead veins. His irises retracted, pupils swamping his eyes until they resembled darkened orbs. Fangs tightened in his jaw.
Anton pulled open his trench coat and cautiously withdrew the saber from its scabbard. He glanced at Paolo; saw that the younger vampire had sensed it too.
“Licantropo,” Anton whispered, and his colleague nodded.
What in the name of the Elders are werewolves doing in this park?
The faint aroma of their targets reached his nose, altering him to their position: straight ahead, in line with the fountain. Were the lycanthrope’s tracking the mortals too? Somehow Anton doubted it. The Italian had not made any claims about the existence of Anton’s wolfish cousins and as far as he knew the man hadn’t cut open any of their breed in the name of science. It seemed to be a very unfortunate coincidence.
This could turn ugly.
Anton’s eternal muscles tightened as the first scream bellowed through the park. The hideous roar of a lycanthrope preceded it, but the distressed shrieking caused Anton’s chilly, undead blood to run ice-cold.
He had no idea whose cries they were but the screams were definitely vampiric, originated from his left, and were filled with tortured agony.
THE LAST STAND
BOOK III of the Blood War Trilogy OUT NOW!
http://bookgoodies.com/a/B00GFCQBDM
After six centuries of brutal conflict a fragile peace now exists between vampires and werewolves. United in the goal of culling the hybrid bloodline, combined raids by both species sweep the globe. Scattered and in disarray, hybrids are forced into Europe to make a last desperate stand for survival.
Tamara Wyatt, a high-ranking hybrid commander, barely escapes with her life after an ambush by werewolves in the Ukraine. Rendezvousing with the remaining clans, she discovers sanctuary is hard to find even amongst her own kind. With the net closing tighter, Tamara must act quickly if she is to save not only her own life but that of the hybrid bloodline.
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Six hundred years of callous bloodlust is not easily forgotten—the supernatural world is governed by lies, treachery, and hidden secrets. Markus, the oldest living vampire, has forged a truce with the pack’s Alpha-Male, Isaac, but has done so at a high price. And already weakened by hatred and betrayal, the ceasefire’s delicate foundations are about to crumble under the most shocking secret of them all.
EXCERPT FROM THE LAST STAND
TWO
Wan Chai District,
Hong Kong Island, China
Anton waited two minutes, stood from his position, and crossed the rooftop to the rear of the structure.
In the building under his feet, four hybrid officers waited for their commander to join them. Anton had no idea what they would talk about in their secret meeting, but if he were quick enough they wouldn’t have the opportunity to discuss anything at all. This wasn’t a reconnaissance mission any longer and Anton’s orders were to do what he’d been recruited for all those centuries ago: elimination. Unbuttoning his long, dark coat, he pushed its tail to one side to expose the crafted pommel of his Chinese Maio Dao sword. He couldn’t see his colleagues, but knew two pairs of vampire Eliminator’s were positioning themselves on either side of the restaurant entrance: his back-up should he need it.
He doubted they’d be required. This wouldn’t be his first solo mission.
Without losing stride, Anton withdrew his saber and stepped from the edge of the building. Gravity took him and he dropped ten feet in less than a second. The rope he’d tied to the rooftop had become slick with rainwater, but his free hand gripped it tight enough that he stopped his descent three feet before the blackened-out window on the rear side of the restaurant. Anton had popped the glass from its frame about an hour ago, when the evening’s clientele were at their most raucous, thus hiding any noise he’d made.
BLOODLINES -- Blood War Trilogy: Book I Page 15