Ravening Hood

by Kendrai Meeks

  “This has to stop, Vlad.” Igor labored to keep his expression even. “Hunting down other creatures, extending your mortality on the blood and bones of the innocent.”

  “You’re one to talk.” Vlad pointed back over his shoulders. “How long before you drain her for your own gain?”

  I shuddered. “Igor, what is he talking about?”

  “Didn’t you hear me, hood?” Vlad bemoaned. “You are a direct descendant of the Betrayer. Hood, yes, but also descended from wolves. It has come down to you over a dozen generations. And my father...” He paused, shooting daggers at the man. “...kept it hidden for his own benefit. How else could a vampire live five hundred years beyond his vampire mortality?”

  Tobias gasped. “But that would make you a thousand years old.”

  “A feat only possible with the rarest of supernatural blood,” Vlad confirmed. “Slayer blood is rich, but burns away quickly. Even the blood of an unmated alpha or beta might give us another hundred or so years. But the blood of an asenaic? The legends say it can let a vampire live forever.”

  The knuckles of Igor’s hand popped as he made fists. “Nothing lives forever, and I’ve only extended my life until I found a way to end yours.”

  “And Inga’s?” Vlad asked.

  Some degree of certainty eked from the elder vampire’s expression. “I could not bear the weight of my many years alone.”

  “You wouldn’t have had to, if you had shared your knowledge with me instead,” Vlad hissed. “So, Gerwalta Kline, you see now why I could not let you go. You are the way I will live forever.”

  But my mind was still stuck at a point in the conversation from sixty second before. “There’s no way my mother is descended from wolves.”

  Igor’s head dipped. “You’re right; she’s not.”

  “But if she’s not, then—” Impossible. Im-poss-i-ble. “My dad?”

  “I suspect that’s why he was turned away from his own clan,” Igor said. “And why he loves your mother when nobody else would, having done what she’s done to her own daughter. He’s mated to her. Bonded, like a wolf.”

  “And that’s also why—” Vlad interrupted, “—I’ll be going after him next.”

  No, not another life.

  I lunged, the sword flying into my grip as I angled it for Vlad’s chest. The vampire smoked, and I flew straight back, landing in the belly of the hole.

  “Quick,” Igor said, pushing me up through the hearth above. “Into the sunlight.”

  “But Tobias!”

  “You’re more important! And I can’t—”

  A cacophony of snarls, growls, and cries filled the chamber below, rebounding on the stone of the hearth overhead. I pulled myself out and dropped the sword on the floor before laying down on my stomach and reaching back into the hole.

  “Tobias!”

  His wolf appeared below. He leapt, claws digging into the earthen sides of the tunnel. For one brilliant moment, the amber pools of his eyes met mine, and then, the tunnel gave way.

  I barely moved in time to save myself as the stone edifice of the fireplace surrendered to gravity, collapsing in.

  “Tobias!”

  Markus appeared from nowhere, dragging me back, his words a jumble.

  “...now!... Boat... flare... no time!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Inga threw the blanket over my shoulders. “They might have survived.”

  I pulled a sip of my tea, slow and deliberate and as loudly as possible. “I’m sure Igor and Vlad survived just fine. A vampire doesn’t need air to live. Wolves do.”

  Markus, his hood subsumed back into nothingness, shimmied below deck. “There’s no world from Ayşe or Serhan. Either they swam off in another direction, or they tried to go out through the street and were overcome.” He took a seat beside me, turning to Inga. “How did you finally find us?”

  Inga looked away. “Brünhild.”

  That finally snapped me out of my haze. “Are you telling me she knew where the Ravens’ house was all this time?”

  The vampire shook her head. “We looked everywhere for some clue of you. Everywhere. Finally, last night, when we still couldn’t find you after a week, we called your mother. Igor felt... I felt that she deserved to know you were missing. That’s when she told us that the dagger you always wore in your hair had a tracker installed in it. It led us here.”

  Markus ran a hand through his hair. “If I had known the vamps knew the matron, I would have called her. We couldn’t have found each other sooner.”

  But the reminder of Inga and my mother’s history triggered a memory of something the vampire had once said. “Was the fact that I’m part-wolf why you suggested to her that I should be killed?”

  Inga blanched. “Geri, you were a child. I didn’t know—”

  “WAS IT?”

  Neither shame nor my glare would let her deny any longer. “I knew the danger of your pedigree being discovered by the Ravens was too great. I worried that Vlad would find you, that he’d seize you and succeed in his quest for immortality. It wasn’t you I suggested she kill, but the chance that the propensity of your kind to breed with wolves and become some kind of vampire superfood.”

  Inga grabbed a newspaper from a seat nearby and blocked the sunlight that streamed in as Caleb opened the door. As soon as he closed it, she lowered it, awaiting his report.

  “Only one unaccounted for,” the slayer reported. “A slayer named Haim.”

  His name means life, I thought, tasting the bitter irony. And now he’s dead.

  Caleb continued, “All in all, a successful rescue. The captain also says he just got a message from Ayşe over the radio. They had sent a member of the pack along with Amy to protect her, just in case. She gave us that wolf’s phone number. He’ll escort her safely to wherever we want to meet her, though she also strongly suggested we get out of Istanbul before night fall.”

  “It is essential that we do, both for our safety, and those of the slayers.” Inga’s dalliance with emotions ended as she turned to Markus, all business. “I can arrange a private plane for this afternoon. You said you knew a place we could take refuge. Where?”

  My cousin shifted in place. “Schloss Wolfsretter, in Bavaria. It’s far from any vampire clutches, deep in the Black Forest.”

  “Seriously?” I evil-eyed the hood across from me. “You think the matrons would agree to let the home of our archives, our high council, and our training facility be overrun by slayers?”

  Markus coughed a laugh. “I’m not planning on asking for permission. We’ll worry about their reaction once they have it. Until then, it’s the right thing to do. Besides, it will be us soon, won’t it? Neither one of us is stupid, Geri. Vlad was already running a de facto slayer breeding program. Now that he knows the power of a wolf-hood hybrid, a—what was the word he used?”

  “Asenaic,” Inga supplied.

  “Right, an asenaic,” Markus resumed. “It’s just the logical thing for him to do. He’s going to take hoods, and he’s going to make them breed with wolves, and then he’s going to use the babies as Capri Suns.”

  I shook my head. “You’re wrong.”

  “What?” Markus’s face distorted, his brow furrowed. “Come on, seriously? It’s like a recipe, he’s just going to follow it.”

  “No, he’s not.” I stood, making my way to the door. “He won’t have to. You don’t seriously think I’m the only one, do you? After a dozen generations coming down from Gerwalta Faust and—” A curt smile bit across my face. “He doesn’t even have a name in our history, does he? Gerwalta’s mate? We just call him ‘the wolf,’ as though that’s all he was. I guess immortalizing him as an animal let us forget his humanity.”

  I would end that somehow. I’d reach back across time, and rebirth my ancestor’s name and his dignity.

  I shook my head. “I can’t have been the only one. We’re going to Schloss Wolfsretter? Fine, then we’ll make good use of our time there. We’ll turn the archives inside out. We’ll
dig through them until we discover the truth. And then, we’ll work our way forward. We’ll find them. We’ll find them before he does.”

  My cousin had the good sense not to oppose me. “Absolutely.”

  THE CAPTAIN DIDN’T know what we were or why we’d been fleeing from a mansion on the Bosporus at five in the morning. He just wanted to know that he’d be paid for his trouble. Inga made sure the lira flowed like the waters around us.

  The summer sun warmed my skin as we passed under the bridge and Alexandra, raising a hand to block the sunlight, stepped up beside me on the deck.

  “You mustn’t lose hope. We survived for decades after the world thought we were dead. He can survive a short time until we find a way to free him.”

  “I saw a fireplace come down on his head, Alex,” I spat back. “Tobias was a wolf, but he was still mortal.”

  “I have seen the brave survive fates worse than death.” The slayer wove an arm around me. “Forget your eyes, what does your heart tell you.”

  “That I should stop falling in love with wolves.” I thought of Cody, thousands of miles away, of his pretty wife, and their chubby little baby. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be bitter. It’s probably best not to talk to me right now.”

  She nodded, pulling back her hold. “When it is the right time, I will be here. And for what it’s worth, so will Caleb.”

  Caleb. In all my grief, I’d never paused to think of his. “He might not be when he finds out I’m in love with another man.”

  “You put so little faith in others. It does not surprise me, when you’ve had so much practice not putting it in yourself.”

  I gripped the rail, shifting my weight as the boat bounced over the wake of a passing freighter. “I’ve never lacked faith in myself.”

  “Not in your ability as a hood, but in your ability to love and to act in the way love demands of you, I think that’s not true.” Her hand tapped my shoulder as she turned to go. “Stop trying to be what other people have told you are. Start being who you really are.”

  Who I really was. But who was I?

  I was a woman who had loved and lost twice. I was a hood who had been relinquished by her own mother, and somehow—though I still didn’t know how—had found her way back to her birthright on her own. I was the namesake and scion of The Betrayer, who, in turn, had been betrayed and lied to by her own blood.

  I was Gerwalta Kline: asenaic, mate to Tobias Somfield in my heart if not by deed, and I would win back my wolf and have my vengeance.

  The red orb of the east burgeoned in its fullness, chasing away the last remnants of the night, and I accepted the road it lit before me.

  And then, I threw back my head, and I howled.

  In the shadows of Paradise dwells the House of Red...

  What makes a nascent hood turn her back on her birthright, her family, and her own heart? What cruelty was the red matron willing to deliver upon her own daughter to force her hand? find out in Requited Hood, a free prequel to the Red Hood Chronicles.

  Gerwalta, Tobias, and the others will return in Summer 2018 in The Red Hood Chronicles, Book four. Also, look this summer for a new kendrai meeks series, the cinderella matrix.

  Would you like to keep up on Kendrai’s other projects and appearances, and get updates on releases and insights into her writing? Join her mail list today.

  ABOUT KENDRAI MEEKS

  Kendrai Meeks was deported from the American Midwest after graduating college, and held against her will since in California. She really hates sarcasm. She first published in 2011, and has since put out books in romance and science fiction. In 2017, she decided to return to her first love, urban fantasy. She is the founder of the Bay Area Allied Indie Authors group. She has also been a featured speaker on a number of conference and industry panels on topics ranging from Fanfiction, to Audiobooks, to Serialized Fiction. She is a world music devotee and loves to travel (just hates to fly – a conflict, for certain). She enjoys twisting the extant into the exceptional, often basing her work on historical themes or legendary folk tales and mythology.

  Acknowledgments

  To the pre-readers: who devote time with kindness, and suffer through enough typos to fill a book. Literally and literarily.

  Catch a typo?

  Ravening Hood has gone through several layers of editing. If you found a typographical, grammatical, or other error which impacted your enjoyment of the book, we offer our apologies and ask that you let us know so we can fix it for future readers. To do so, click here. In appreciation, you will be entered into a monthly drawing for a $10 gift card.

  © 2018 TULIPE NOIRE Press

  Kendrai Meeks

  Ravening Hood

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Published by: Kendrai Meeks

  Text Design by: The Last TK, with compliments to the resources made available from Draft2Digital.

  Cover Design by: Mario Lampic

  Edited by: Laura Martone and The Last TK