by Michele Hauf
St. John observed it from the rooftop above, standing half hidden behind a sign made of the same kind of steel beams that reinforced his apartment, though these beams weren’t silver-coated. Vampires couldn’t detect anything through exposed metal. Metal, like sunlight, could hurt them, become the true end of them if coated. If silver pierced unholy flesh in the right place, they were dust.
In this day and age, a silver bullet through the head or through the empty cavity that had once held a heart was the quickest way to take down a monster like this one. A quick, final death that could be issued from a distance.
But that was too easy.
Since his own new existence had begun with drinking from a golden cup, he was exempt from the problems of metal. He had exposed himself to all kinds after that, and had for long years carried both shield and sword.
This hideous Nosferatu had caught a scent. Lifting its chin to sniff the air, it then swung around, searching for the source of the smell, failing to look up, perhaps sensing and disliking the heavy tonnage of beams.
The game of the moment had become hide-and-seek.
Unable to trace what it had scented, the beast’s narrow head cocked once before its body went completely motionless, like a statue carved from a block of flawed marble. It didn’t blink because it didn’t have to, didn’t breathe because it had no need for air, and never had to fake breath in order to fit in with any other kind of society.
Not even its long coat moved.
St. John heard its thoughts, and they weren’t pretty. The mantra was a cycle of hatred, disgust and bloodlust looped together. He felt its venom and the chaos holding the white carcass together.
This sucker was a forerunner, the first trickle of a nightmarish stream of monsters on their way. It was also alone at the moment.
St. John’s tattoos became a barely tolerable ball of fire, calling up the strength of his background, urging him to action. For the sake of the people of London, who might get in the way at any moment, and for the sake of everything he’d given up in his own past in order to prevent such a circumstance as this one from happening, he had to deal with this crazy sucker and the flood of others behind it, quickly.
Walking to the edge of the rooftop, he braced himself. With the wind on his face and his power rising swiftly to the surface of his skin, he began, measure by measure, to shed his disguise.
Chapter 24
Madison’s heart hammered. Restlessness returned.
“Stewart?” she said.
She pressed her forehead to the glass.
The street below St. John’s apartment was dark. A big moon rode the sky behind a bank of black clouds.
St. John was out there somewhere, chasing demons. Her brother was out there, too, waiting for her.
The glass felt cool against her fingertips. The night beyond the glass resonated with indistinguishable shapes, and movement. Even St. John’s refuge wasn’t immune from the pressure of those things.
She didn’t know how to help St. John. If she tried, she might distract him. She could go after her brother, though. One of those shadows on the street below might be Stewart. In finding Stewart, she’d find herself.
As she turned for the door, rage began to build inside her for whoever had hurt her brother. She didn’t feel particularly brave or courageous. The thought of having to go outside, for any reason, made her stomach roil.
Damn it, though, she had to go out there, ignoring St. John’s “Please.”
Unable to stand the suspense, and with her missing courage overruled by sheer determination, Madison headed for the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the ghost of Christopher St. John. “You, of all...people, should understand.”
* * *
“You’re looking for me?” St. John called out to the monster on the sidewalk, landing quietly beside it.
The thing had no tongue, making a reply impossible. Nor did it possess a functioning brain able to process surprise or fear. Nosferatu were terrors designed only for one purpose—to hunt their prey. They were ghosts of the worst parts of the human psyche. Animals, really, with one-track desires.
They wouldn’t notice St. John’s glowing white skin that had burned through his clothes, or the ripples of extraordinary muscle fueled by a mythical resurrection. They wouldn’t be afraid of the halo of golden hair radiating outward as if he were a dark angel, or the reddened gleam of his Maker’s blood tinting his eyes.
The beast’s black sockets trained on St. John. He felt a shudder of satisfaction run through it.
St. John smiled. This one wasn’t so very old, and therefore inexperienced.
“They sent only one of you?” he remarked as the creature moved first one arm, then the other, as though thawing from a deep freeze. “You do know what I am?”
The creature lunged so fast, it became a colorless smear. St. John, with equal speed, sidestepped the thrust of a specially made knife, pulled from the monster’s pocket. He had only seconds to study that weapon, forged of both gold and silver, one of those ingredients the same as the chalice that had changed him.
Someone had their facts straight about the Grail, too. But most facts having to do with the Seven who drank from that holy cup were erroneous.
The Nosferatu spun in place and lunged again, catching the edge of St. John’s sweater where only traces of it remained, clinging to his waistband. In a burst of extraordinary speed, St. John raised his arms, spreading the blooded sigils carved into him—the sigils that responded to the Nosferatu with an almost audible whine.
Cool London mist clung to his bareness as he widened his stance. The scars crisscrossing his body became livid reminders of past battles, each one of them scalding the cooler skin around them.
His tattoos burned hotter than the depths of the hell the monster beside him had sprung from. Not a cold burn this time. Powerfully hot.
His power focused.
He felt himself growing further into the terrible entity he had been created to be. The one he had to be in order to best the worst of the villains.
More muscle was there for the asking. His shoulders stretched, pulling at his bones. He heard his spine crackle with a live energy conceived of centuries of righteousness, after having being born in the dark. The two worlds met in his body, throwing sparks and shadow that were divinely beautiful and fiendishly terrible.
The Hunter came on, fast, strong, determined. Before it had moved too far, he had the thing by its throat and its weapon in his hand. As the Hunter’s eyes locked with his, St. John sunk the knife deeply into the creature’s gaunt chest.
“Are you an example of what I can expect?” he said to the monster. “Because that would be nice.”
There was an explosion of body parts, and a rain of mottled gray ash. St. John watched the ash fall, thinking that killing this beast had been alarmingly simple for a Blood Knight in pursuit of peace. There had been no fight to speak of. Not this time. This had been a warning. Merely a hint of what was to follow.
More monsters were coming. Two of them had entered London from another direction. Another slithered in their wake in the old tunnels beneath the city.
Their approach filled St. John with rage.
With the weapon grasped tightly in his hand, he paused. Raising his eyes to the sky, he was struck by a new pain. Madison had left the safety of his refuge. Her voice reached him along the thread tying them together.
“I’m sorry. You, of all...people, should understand.”
Muttering a sharp “No!” across the link connecting him to her, St. John sucked in a lungful of the crackling power that was his immortal birthright, and turned back toward the city.
* * *
Madison crept from the safety of St. John’s building with her nerves on fire.
Stepping to the street,
she waited, listening for footsteps, finding some and thinking that vampires probably moved soundlessly, and that footsteps meant the two figures she’d seen from the window had to be people. Humans. Mortals.
If she possessed the special genetics of a vampire Slayer, shouldn’t she have been able to tell the difference between men and monsters?
Other than the footsteps retreating into the distance, the night was eerily silent. Long shadows, cast by the moon, made the street look seriously noir. She sensed nothing. Not one special trait kicked in to help her.
Setting her shoulders, gritting her teeth, she stepped off the curb. She walked to the center of the narrow street. There were no passing cabs or cars. The moon shone from straight up in the sky.
Ears straining, she felt the slow seep of a rising panic, not knowing which way to go, or what to do.
She ventured a call. “Stewart?”
Movement behind her spun her around. She hadn’t heard this coming....
That was her last thought before a black-eyed monster, its appearance unimaginable even in nightmares, threw her to the pavement with a simple flick of its wrist.
* * *
The arrival of the Nosferatu sat like a bad taste in St. John’s mouth. The fear of them meeting Madison, if that were to happen, fueled his outrage.
He twitched the thread connecting her to him as he sprinted street by street toward his apartment, and found that thread unreasonably taut. Across it, he heard Madison’s scream.
Utilizing every bit of the power he had so carefully hidden, he raced on, fearful for the first time he could recall, and calculating how long it would take him to get to her.
Turning one last corner, his speed too fast to raise dust or debris, he slammed to a halt in front of two of the monsters he had sensed.
One of them leaned over Madison, who was stretched out on the ground.
“At last,” Simon Monteforte said. “We see the Protector in action.”
St. John flicked his eyes to Madison. Her breathing came in gasps, but her heart beat strongly. The Nosferatu hadn’t harmed her because she wasn’t on his radar.
“What is it you want, Simon?” he asked, his tone deadly serious.
“Look at you,” Monteforte said. “You’re some kind of freakish angel, not one of us. You’ve never been one of us, and the others are too self-absorbed to see it. You glow from within, special, pale and pretty. You have the blood of angels in you, as well as your Maker’s. Due to this, you have hidden yourself well from the Ancients. But you haven’t fooled me. I want to be like you. I want you to tell me how to make that possible.”
“What is it you want, Simon?”
“The thing you’ve kept hidden from us. From me.”
“Name that thing you’d do all of this for,” St. John said.
“Power.”
“I’d have thought you had enough power. You are one of the Hundred.”
Monteforte waved that suggestion away with a subtle twist of his fingers. “That’s ninety-nine vampires too many.”
St. John stood his ground, his bare chest reflecting the moonlight, his arms tense at his sides.
“What you want isn’t possible,” he said. “You know it.”
“I will have the Grail, St. John.”
“The Grail is a legend.”
“As are you, supposedly, and yet your light blinds me. Which one of the Seven Blood Knights are you? The first? The last? I’ve paid a lot of people, some of them immortal, some not, to find out about you. And here you were, in our midst, the whole time.”
St. John observed the ancient traitor closely. Monteforte stank of this selfish greed. With Nosferatu by his side, under his spell, and Madison at his feet, Monteforte posed a real threat. He’d hurt Madison if given the opportunity, in order to hurt St. John.
However, St. John’s expanded senses perceived another visitor in the shadows of the overhang of the building to his right. Someone not on the Nosferatu’s radar, either, since the monster hadn’t turned to look. Oddly enough, neither had Simon Monteforte, whose attention remained locked to St. John as if the old vampire’s greed had indeed blinded him to anything other than getting his way.
St. John’s sigils pulsed, the danger in them building until his back was crawling with movement indicating the promise of what he could do to the old vampire in seconds if Madison hadn’t been involved.
It was a strange time to discover just how much he loved her, and to realize the extent of the agony he’d suffer if he were to lose her, or leave her behind.
“What would you do with the power you seek?” he asked Monteforte to gain time.
“Rule the world, as you and the others of your kind could, if you chose. Surely you’ve considered doing so?”
Monteforte gave a signal that amounted to little more than a slight raising of his hand, and the black-eyed monster took a gliding step forward.
Something else moved, as well. The shadow lurking near the building came on fast, and St. John heard Madison’s intake of breath when she, too, identified who it was.
By then it was too late for Monteforte to ignore his surroundings. Casually, as if facing a conspirator, the old vampire glanced sideways. He said to Madison’s brother, “I thought we took care of you, Stewart. Pity you didn’t stay down.”
When confronted with so many monsters, hell had no option but to break loose.
Chapter 25
The horrid, twisted creature holding her had let go. Scrambling sideways, Madison knew better than to run to any of the beings here for assistance. There wasn’t a mortal among them.
“Stewart,” she said.
Her brother didn’t respond, or look her way. Stewart’s face, free of the shadows that had hidden it, told her all she needed to know.
Stewart was parchment-pale, and gaunt to the point of starvation. His face was sharp, cold and soberly intent. He wore a dark shirt, partially tattered, and an old pair of jeans, torn at the knees. His hair was disheveled, with long streaks of gray running through the red-auburn color.
He didn’t look strong, or completely alive. Yet Stewart had again arrived when needed, as though he had been keeping watch over her all this time.
With a snap of her head, she swept her gaze to St. John, who had also become someone else. Something else. Bigger. Painfully beautiful. Altered both in shape and content, he radiated power that was visible as it crossed his skin, as if power were waves of moving muscle.
He was the personification of the knights of old, and radiated with the glory of angels. A human made more than human. A being apart from the rules governing reality.
Madison could hardly look at him, and yet couldn’t make herself look away. She had heard the conversation between him and Monteforte, and the old vampire’s accusations: something about St. John being able to rule the world if he wanted to.
His half-naked body gleamed with the luster of a south-sea pearl as he met the wiry, black-eyed monster rushing at him. The dichotomy of the twisted flesh of the monster meeting with St. John’s fierce, deadly light, was breathtaking.
The impact of their bodies hitting was loud in the quiet of the night. The monster moved with incredible speed, but it was clear from the start that the beast had no chance against its superior counterpart.
St. John reeked of power. The air had become electrified with it.
And he had purposefully left the gray-haired vampire he had called Monteforte for Stewart to deal with—which suggested to Madison that Stewart had met the velvet-clad monster before.
This was the Ancient that St. John had said was the wrong one for Stewart to have found, and was the creep in the Germand’s lobby. Simon Monteforte was the beast that had betrayed her twin’s confidence.
Madison didn’t know where to look, or what to do. The fighting
had started in two places, and her attention remained glued to her lover.
On his back, covering an expansive space from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, a fiery design burned in the night as if it were a live flame. The tattoos looked like a blaze of wings about to unfurl. Unearthly. Beautiful. Angry. Unlike anything else in existence.
He had told her there was no other like him.
Shaking off her stupor, Madison finally tore her gaze from him to see that her brother had circled the old gray-haired vampire. In Stewart’s gloved hand a knife glinted wickedly in the moonlight. Silver. Metal for killing vampires, if the aim was true.
The vampire St. John had addressed as Monteforte wore a feral expression of sly cunning. Her brother’s face remained dangerously expressionless, as if emotion had been stripped from him, along with parts of his former life.
Monteforte was wild, and frightening. He seemed to her a deadly foe in the sheer length of his existence alone. Still, her twin moved as though that didn’t matter. Sustained by vampire blood passed to him through the savage bites of Monteforte’s vampires, and therefore maybe even Monteforte himself, her twin, because of his heritage and his destiny, had beat the odds of death’s two-fisted knock.
It was too damn incredible an event to go unnoticed on a public street. Alerted to movement in the shadows, Madison jumped sideways to meet it. Through their bond, she shared St. John’s awareness of another monster, not too distant, on its way.
She didn’t have time to confront that oncoming shadow. Another shadow beside it pushed her out of the way and stood in her place.
Madison held her breath.
If this was another Nosferatu, the good guys here, no matter how strong they were, would be outnumbered.
Uncertain now as to where to look, fearing for her brother, wanting to watch St. John, she felt her chest begin to ache from the riotous beating of her heart.
She had to do something.
Madison flung herself at Simon Monteforte, ramming into him with every ounce of strength she possessed. Monteforte tilted sideways. Recovering quickly, he rounded back to Stewart.