by J. K. Coi
Intercepting the hooker, Rhys took hold of her elbow. She weaved, trying to focus. Her glassy eyes looked up at him but didn’t see. Rhys directed her across the street and warned her to get indoors.
Of course, humans could never just do what they were told. They always had to argue and assert their “rights”.
“Hey! Let go of me. There ain’t no law against walking down the street,” she screeched, yanking her arm free and stumbling back, her ankle twisting as the tall skinny heel of her thigh-high boots caught between the concrete slabs of sidewalk. “Police brutality!”
Rhys didn’t bother to correct her misconception. He shrugged, gesturing nonchalantly to the two demons following her.
“It’s up to you, but if you value your life, you’ll can the offended citizen routine and get inside. Now.”
The demons’ disguises were believable—a male and female couple holding hands and strolling innocuously along the boardwalk. What could be more harmless? But if you looked closely—actually looked and paid attention—you would see it. The feral, hungry look in their eyes, the pasty skin, the evil radiating from their pores in a river of thirst that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what it was. Greedy. Unnatural. Eager.
The woman saw.
She had been on the streets long enough to recognize a situation she wanted no part of. Without another word she started walking, self-preservation granting steadiness to her steps as she hustled her drug-shattered self in the opposite direction.
The two demons caught on to who he was pretty quickly. Hesitating for just a moment, they assessed him, speculating, wondering whether or not they could take him. He dared them to try.
Rhys was outwardly calm but for the hand clenching into a solid fist at his side. Inside, adrenaline gathered, surging in his veins, heating his blood. He needed this in a big way.
The demons exchanged a look before scurrying off down the walk in the opposite direction.
Rhys agreeably gave chase, following hard on their heels. In just a few minutes he had them cornered inside a deserted building down a dark side street. The two turned on him, one trying to get around for a shot at him from behind while the other—the “female”—lunged, teeth bared and claws extended, right for his throat.
He slugged it. A hard left to the jaw just in time to save his jugular from being ripped out. The other one was already on his back, jagged talons digging into his shoulder blades. Its foul breath reeked of something rotting and dead as it puffed and snorted in Rhys’ ear. Just before the monster could sink its razor-sharp teeth into his neck, Rhys reached up, pulling it off him by the hair and hurling the body over his shoulder. It went sailing right into the other demon, which had just gotten back on its feet. It was time to stop playing around.
Pulling a short sword from the holster under his coat, Rhys advanced carefully, knowing that the pair was far from beaten yet. Sure enough, when they both snarled up at him, their glamor was gone, revealing their true nature in all its scaly, horrific glory.
He could no longer tell which one had been posing as male or female, but it didn’t matter. Slashing the one closest to him with his blade, he turned and delivered a powerful side-kick to the other, then went back for the kill on demon number one, separating its head in a clean slice.
Before the demon’s death cry had faded into the night air, Rhys was already hacking at demon number two. This one was proving a little quicker, a little smarter, and it scored a long gash down the front of Rhys’ chest with sharp claws. Rhys hissed but didn’t hesitate as he thrust his blade through the monster’s black heart.
Breathing heavily, he watched both bodies go up in a glowing ball of green fire. They left nothing but a heavy dust behind.
It wasn’t enough. He was still itching for a fight, and spent an hour trolling the streets for another demon to wale on, without success. That was surprising since lately he hadn’t been able to walk a block after sunset without stumbling over them.
Finally, Rhys found himself heading toward the place where Duncan was killed.
Rhys stopped in a small hollow surrounded on one side by high rock formations that loomed overhead.
Twenty minutes outside of the city shadow and fog rolled between the trees of a dense forest and the wind whispered threats in his ear.
It had happened here.
The night before, Rhys had woken from one of his dreams knowing that something was going to happen. He’d felt it all day long…an edgy tension in the air. He’d tried to stop Duncan from going out on his own. The older Immortal had paid him no heed.
When Rhys had found him hours later, Duncan had already been dead, his body a bloody mess of claw and bite marks. Rhys had reached out, only to recoil in disgust as scores of small snakelike organisms, barely visible to the naked eye, slithered out from Duncan’s bloody wounds, drawn by the scent of Rhys’ fresh, warm blood. Sickened, he’d brushed them off before they could bite him, but even when he knew they were gone, he’d felt like he had fire ants crawling all over him.
One demon was well known for such a bite. The Nina.
Duncan’s corpse was already riddled with the unnatural parasites. He’d had to burn it down to ash to stop them from multiplying and moving on to fresh prey.
Nothing had grown here in the months since Duncan’s blood soaked the ground, and it would be a barren, dead place for many years to come. As he stared at the scorched circle of burned, black earth Rhys felt the heavy weight of his failures. A lifetime’s worth. Duncan hadn’t been the only one he’d let die. Now that he’d met Amy, he knew he wouldn’t be the last, either.
He turned to go. Why he continued to come here was anyone’s guess. He had scoured every inch of this area in the days following Duncan’s murder but hadn’t found any clues to finding the demon responsible.
It was guilt that drew him here, and Duncan’s ashes that called to him for vengeance.
Chapter Five
Rhys glanced upward, taking in the concrete, steel and glass of the fifty-story office building owned by IMO Laboratories. The Laveile brothers, Kane and Roland, had been ruling their little empire here for the better part of a century. The company specialized in genetic research, the scope of which branched out into different fields, including a study that looked at the effects of aging. IMO’s findings had conclusively isolated the specific mitochondrial mutations that cause aging, and laboratories around the world were now jumping on this new data to determine whether growing old could be counteracted by genetic, pharmacological or dietary interventions.
This project and others were really just smoke screens for its more pressing motivation—and the reason the brothers had started their company three generations ago—no Immortal had ever conceived a child.
For hundreds of years it was believed that infertility was an unfortunate side effect of the massive changes that occurred in a human’s DNA during the transition to Immortality. But in recent years, the brothers had been able to test at the cellular level, and discovered that sterility wasn’t necessarily the issue. On the contrary, an Immortal’s sperm showed above average signs of motility and were just as fertile as any normal, able-bodied human male’s.
Rather, the change altered the Immortal’s fundamental makeup so much that it was simply no longer compatible with that of a human woman.
That wasn’t to say it would be utterly impossible for an Immortal to get a woman pregnant, just impossible enough that, as far as anyone knew, it had never actually happened.
Rhys pushed through the heavy carousel doors of the office building and approached the security desk. An elderly security guard dressed in a crisply pressed uniform was just picking up the phone. A moment later he looked up at Rhys and set the phone back on its cradle.
“The Misters Laveile have asked that you go right up, sir. Please take the elevator to the top floor.” The security guard eyed him with a shrewd awareness but no real surprise. This was a man who knew his employers well.
Rhys nodded briefly,
also not surprised Kane and Roland had known exactly the moment he entered their territory. In fact he would have been disappointed if they had not.
As he strode to the elevators, Rhys felt several pairs of eyes following him. He looked out of place next to the businessmen and women making their way across the lobby toward the elevator, all in dark suits and colorful ties, their hard-soled shoes clicking on the marble tiles and cell phones super-glued to their ears.
Rhys had worn leather and dark glasses.
He exited the elevator on the fiftieth floor and entered the large reception area. It was manned by a thin, nervous-looking woman in a somber gray business suit.
She watched him approach her desk with wide eyes that grew bigger and rounder with each of his measured steps. He feared she might stroke if he so much as breathed on her, so he kept his voice calm and measured. Non-threatening. Friendly.
“Kane and Roland Laveile…please.”
She responded with a squeal that she quickly choked back behind clenched teeth. Okay, he’d been polite even if he couldn’t quite manage friendly. The woman obviously suffered from a nervous disorder.
She cleared her throat three times before stammering out a greeting. “Hello, sir. Yes, sir, you are expected.” The receptionist gathered herself together long enough to come around the desk and usher him through the heavy oak door to the inner offices.
As soon as he had stepped over the threshold, the door flew shut behind him, and Rhys couldn’t hold in his chuckle any longer.
Large, architecturally impressive windows ran the length of the grand room from floor to ceiling. A group of four oversized, comfortable black leather chairs sat in front of two identical solid oak desks positioned next to each other in the center of the office. One of the desks was loaded with computer equipment, while the other had only one laptop and some loose paperwork.
These two desks mirrored the brothers who sat at them. Identical twins, they differed little in their physical appearance. They were both tall, well-built men. They both had curly brown hair—although Roland tended to keep his shorter than Kane. Two dynamic but different personalities and two pairs of cutting silver eyes glowed with compelling intelligence and their unique Immortal spirit.
The brothers’ refined features reflected the generations of French aristocracy that ran in their veins, a noble bloodline that had effectively died out when the twins had undergone the transition to Immortality so many years ago.
“Rhys, only you would take such pleasure in tormenting my secretary. What did you do to give her that hunted look?” an amused voice called from across the room.
“I swear I was going for polite and non-threatening.” He reached out to take Kane’s hand as the normally quiet twin approached. Kane was the computer geek of the partnership. In fact, he had been recruited to assist the military in developing its first encryption software back in the early 1970s. He’d continued to work on government projects on and off for fifty years, under various names so as to keep the truth of his identity a secret. There wasn’t anything the man couldn’t do with a computer.
“Polite maybe, but you couldn’t do non-threatening if you wore a tutu and danced a Scottish jig.” Roland laughed, stopping beside his brother. He also reached out and shook Rhys’ hand. Roland was the more outgoing brother. Just as brilliant, although more comfortable in a lab coat looking through a microscope than fiddling with computers. Like Kane, Roland had taken on projects for some very secretive agencies over the last several decades. His work had been especially vital in the isolation of the hantavirus in the mid-1970s, and he had been one of the first scientific minds on board the Human Genome Project in the early 1990s.
“How have you been Rhys?” Roland wore a crisp black pinstriped suit. His hair was immaculately groomed, shoes shined and polished. It was quite a departure from his lab coat. “I’m surprised you managed to drag your ass out into the light of day. You’re practically a vampire these days.”
“Funny,” replied Rhys with a smile, “but some of us actually have jobs to do. We can’t all sit around playing dress-up with the humans. Demons hunt at night, and that means so do I.”
“Ever the hard-ass, huh Rhys?” Roland joked.
Kane and Roland had been born of an aristocratic family in 1778 France. When they were fifteen, the revolution had torn their family apart. Although the brothers’ father, a dispossessed count, had managed to safely bring his children to distant cousins in Italy, he’d succumbed to a debilitating fever weeks later and died. Kane and Roland had transitioned only a few years later.
It was very rare for more than one male member of a family to be chosen by the Guardian for Immortality, but it had long been assumed that because Kane and Roland were twins and shared the same genes, they also shared the same destiny.
While they shared many other things as well, their Immortal strengths had been divided between them. While Roland got the strength, Kane had more psychic ability. The two always worked as a team, and together they were a nearly unbeatable force.
When Duncan had been ambushed, it had been Roland who’d called Rhys to let him know that Kane had seen what was to happen, reinforcing Rhys’ own fears that day. Not that it had done any good. Rhys was still too late. Duncan had still died, and the demon responsible was gone.
Rhys walked to the huge windows and gazed out at the impressive skyline view before turning to lean a shoulder against the clear glass. He assessed the two before him and knew them both to be strong and trustworthy warriors.
“You both know that the demons have been strutting through this city lately like it’s their own personal amusement park, and there are more of them coming out of the woodwork than I’ve ever seen before. I can’t keep up with the horde on my own.”
“What can we do to help?” asked Kane.
“I want to propose that we join forces for a while.”
“Join forces?” Roland leaned a hip casually against the back of a chair, crossing his arms. “It’s not like we haven’t been on the same side all this time.”
“We haven’t been what anyone would call organized, either. Look, I know something big is coming, and for all our sakes I think we should plan a course of action and at least try to be prepared for it.” The last thing Rhys wanted was to see another Immortal lose his life when it could easily be prevented with some strategic planning and a system of backup and support.
“No, hey, you’re absolutely right. Count us in,” Roland and Kane both nodded their agreement. “So, do you think this surge in demon activity has something to do with Duncan’s death?” Roland asked.
“I don’t know anything for sure. Duncan could handle himself, and no run-of-the-mill watcher would have been able to bring him down—even on a bad day.”
Kane stepped in, “You mentioned before that you thought it was a serpent demon. Do we know anything about it?”
“Just that it’s powerful,” Rhys crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s called the Nina. I’ve seen some of what it can do, but I haven’t come face-to-face with it before.”
The Nina was a dangerous, snakelike monster that entranced its victims into a deadly embrace. Its bite carried a living poison that fed on blood. Anyone unfortunate enough to live through a run-in with it was in for a world of suffering as he or she fought the uncontrollable compulsion to take more and more blood, blood that was needed to feed the ravenous parasites that invaded the body and quickly took over all systems.
Rhys had come across one of these poor victims only once before. Though the man had been human once, what Rhys encountered was just a shell. Emaciated and weak. A ravenous creature driven wild by hunger and desperation. Rhys had been forced to put him out of his misery, finding out only later that the hunger and intense craving had been caused by the nasty parasites that the Nina had injected into his blood.
“Right now this Nina seems to have crawled back under whatever rock coughed it up to begin with,” Rhys continued. “If it came from the Abyss, it won’t be e
ager to go back. I’d like your help to take this thing out, but I’ll go after it alone if I have to.”
“We know you usually work alone, but you’ve never had to do it alone, Rhys. Of course we’re with you.” Kane stood by his brother. They exchanged one of those looks that said they were doing the twin thing—silently conferring with each other—then Roland gave Kane a small nod of his head.
“You should know that I’ve been picking up some bad vibes lately. I think that I’m seeing the death of another Immortal. It’s blurry as to who or when, but we definitely need to stick together and pool resources.” Kane’s look was far away, almost as if he were actually seeing the images now. “Hopefully, this death can be averted.”
Roland placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Kane and I were going to head out to patrol the south end tonight. Why don’t we keep you posted, then meet up when we’re done, and talk strategy?”
“Sounds like a plan. Contact Doyle and see if he can make it too. I’m off to find Alric. If the mangy Saxon can tear himself away from his wife long enough, I’ll have him join us.”
Kane and Roland were relatively new to the game in comparison to Rhys, Alric, and Doyle, though there was a healthy dose of respect from the younger Immortals toward the three elders—by far the most experienced warriors in this part of the world. Doyle was the oldest among them, followed by Rhys, then Alric.
Immortals had never been very big on structure and organization, but the pecking order was usually pretty clear. The eldest in any particular area usually allocated patrol sections to other Immortals, kept tabs on them to make sure testosterone levels didn’t go through the roof, and generally tried to make sure that human casualties were minimized in their underground war with the demon population.