There was little moon, just a sliver, and the black clouds moving across the sky hid even that most of the time, so the lake’s water mostly appeared dark and shiny. Out of the oppressive stillness of the woods, Ferro felt a breeze. The draft tugged at the surface of the lake, creating ripples across it so waves lapped at the shore. It looked and even sounded like an idyllic scene, until one felt that ominous decay creeping out of the forest and hovering so close.
The owls and crows made no sound, but continuously walked back and forth on the twisted limbs, peering toward the lake, their gazes suddenly focused in that direction, alerting Ferro and his brethren. Crows were day birds, but they were out in numbers, spies for their master. Shadows appeared darker, staining the surface, as several hideous creatures flew low just above the lake’s waters.
Do not engage. Let us see where their lair is. They must have an entrance nearby, Ferro cautioned.
Ferro doubted if this location had been chosen by Sergey originally. It was more likely one of his brothers who had scouted the area and realized it was perfect to provide them with the hikers and campers for a steady blood supply. They were far enough away from the Carpathian compound that few hunters would stumble across them.
The four ancient hunters stayed a good distance apart, careful not to make any movement that would alert the watchers or the master vampires hurrying back to their lair. Ferro wanted to know how extensive Sergey’s army really was. How many could he count on to throw at the compound? How many would he be willing to sacrifice in order to get Elisabeta back? Would the hunters be able to wipe out the threat in one major attack, or would they have to hit hard in several smaller ones?
More than anything, Ferro wanted to eliminate the threat to his lifemate, but first he needed to have answers to protect all of those in the compound. It was ingrained in him as a hunter that the protection of his people always came first, and no matter what it meant to him personally, the code of honor instilled in him had to be followed.
Three vampires dropped out of the sky near the shore of the lake and strode purposefully toward the forest. They weren’t trying to impress anyone with their looks. They appeared in their real state of decay, rotting flesh stretched over bone, hair mostly gone or falling out in chunks, teeth pointed and stained. At the tree line they separated to about twelve feet apart and lifted their hands high into the air.
Ferro and the brethren watched closely as they wove a complicated pattern, opening an unseen entrance so very well hidden that not one of the ancients had detected its presence. They noted the positioning of the three advance guards. Ferro vaguely recognized the three vampires. They were much younger than he was, but he had run across each of them on more than one occasion while they were still hunters.
The one to his left was from a good lineage. He remembered the father. A great hunter, legendary even. He’d been killed by three master vampires. He’d taken one of them with him before he’d succumbed. His son went by Van Halen. Luther Van Halen.
Sedrick Overtower was in the middle. Ferro didn’t know much about him or his family, but he seemed to be a decent enough hunter.
The one on the right had been sloppy as a hunter, too loud at times, and Ferro was a little surprised that he had managed to survive and battle his way to become a master vampire. It didn’t seem likely given the fact that he should have been killed early on in his hunting career. He had called himself Edward Varga back then. Even now, when he was opening the gates of the lair inside the forest, Varga was a bit sloppy, his movements less precise than the others’. Ferro found it interesting that he had been chosen as one of Sergey’s advance guards. He couldn’t imagine any of the other Malinov brothers tolerating Varga’s ways.
A veil appeared, like a thick spider’s web, a dank, dingy gray color. It hung like Spanish moss might from the twisted branches of the trees, a macabre shawl dripping in poisonous venom. Little beads of darker gray oozed from the web, ran down the strands to trickle onto the ground where they hissed and steamed as they hit the rotting vegetation. The pools spread out into a thin stream, connecting until they formed a moat, a semicircle—a barrier around the opening the vampires had disclosed.
Once the moat was in place, the strands of the web drew back, hissing and moaning as if alive and reluctant to part, the threads reaching toward the vampires, down toward the ground, and up into the trees toward the sentries there. One tentacle managed to wrap itself around a crow and drag it back into the center of the web. The crow screamed horribly, beak opened wide, eyes rolling wildly as the hungry threads began to consume it alive.
The vampires paused what they were doing to watch, clearly amused by the spectacle, enjoying the bird’s pain. Varga’s thin lips stretched wide and he made a squawking sound, imitating the bird’s distressed cry. The other two vampires laughed. Even as they did, the air around them suddenly grew so dense that they began to cough. Varga coughed up blood and spat maggots onto the ground. Some landed in the moat, where the acid fried them instantly.
The three master vampires looked cowed in spite of the fact that they had gone centuries battling and defeating Carpathian hunters, earning the title of master vampire. The three shuddered and turned toward the five vampires striding toward them. Sergey was in the middle, two master vampires on either side of him. Clearly, he wasn’t taking any chances with his own safety. He had left with two master vampires, and somewhere another two had joined him. He had pawns at his disposal and no less than seven master vampires to fight for him. That was serious firepower.
There was fury in every step Sergey took. He had been thwarted in his goal of retrieving Elisabeta. He had no idea why the infection wasn’t spreading or working. The healer wasn’t supposed to be able to stop it. Many of those inside had to have the command in their brain to open the gate, yet no one had done so. By now the ancients should have been turning on one another. Chaos should have been reigning inside the compound. He didn’t understand and he didn’t have Elisabeta.
He had thought he could always contact Elisabeta, that she would be unable to resist coming to him, but she had. The few times they had connected he had felt her terror, but those times had been too few and hadn’t lasted long. He would find a way to get to her, and when he did, she would suffer as she never had before. He was just getting started, pinning humans to the gates. He would surround the compound with the dead and dying in her name. He would stick the heads of children on spikes and put them on the fence facing her, to stare at her with accusing eyes, so she would see them and know she had forced him to go to such lengths.
Snarling, he looked for a target for his impotent rage. Any target. He wanted to kill and keep killing, but cruelly, mercilessly, painfully, the way he had as a boy when his brothers teased him and he felt powerless, just as he did now. He would go into the forest and spend hours ripping apart animals and watching them suffer, looking into their eyes, feeling such immense satisfaction while their blood spilled around him and they silently begged him for death. He wouldn’t give it to them.
Later, he graduated to human children. That had been even more satisfying, especially when he had befriended them first, over time making them believe that he was their friend by bringing them little gifts and even doing chores occasionally. Knowing all the while that sooner or later his brothers would shove him around or make fun of him and he would come back and spend time enjoying torturing his victims. He welcomed the way they tormented him just so he could have the satisfaction of feeling omnipotent when he spent hours with his victims. It was one of the most delicious and powerful rushes in the world. Taking Elisabeta out from under the nose of her family and forcing her to his will each rising kept that feeling in him, especially knowing he hid her from his brothers.
He strode straight up to Luther Van Halen. The master vampire had always thought far too much of himself. He strutted around, his followers loyal to him rather than to Sergey. It wasn’t to be tolerated. And laughing? At him? Because he couldn’t get to Elisabeta? Lu
ther had most likely conspired against him. Luther wanted to lead the others. He was just like Vadim, one of Sergey’s older brothers. He’d been one of Vadim’s trusted lieutenants, although Sergey had no idea what Vadim had seen in the vampire.
Luther stood there impassively as Sergey continued to come at him, no expression on his face. Sergey didn’t slow down, but the fact that Luther stood his ground infuriated him even more. He should be cowering. The other two would have had the good sense to back away, but not Luther. He was always challenging for leadership. Sergey had every right to reprimand him. To let loose his fury on the conspirator.
Without warning he slashed across Luther’s face with the talons of the harpy eagle, ripping through what flesh was left, tearing it from the bone and tossing it carelessly into that writhing, poisonous, starving web. The threads came alive, hissing and fighting for the morsel of flesh. The moment they had a taste, the web wanted more, sending out tentacles in every direction, greedy for even that rotting meat.
Sergey kept slashing, not giving Luther a chance to recover, stepping into him, ripping into his chest, tearing at his belly to get at entrails, slitting the vampire open so that black blood poured onto the ground. The tentacles acted like tubes, dangling from the trees, dipping into the thick gel of shiny black in a frenzied feeding.
The moment the vampire’s blood was spilled, from inside the hole the three master vampires had opened, lesser vampires stumbled out, clearly starved, desperate for blood, any blood, even the acid blood of another vampire. There were ten of them, newly made and fresh from the ground. All had been human males, presumably the psychic males Sergey was using as the pawns he would throw in front of the Carpathian hunters.
The newly made vampires rushed for the pool of black blood the vampire had torn open, knocking into him and driving him into Sergey, who stumbled backward. Luther slammed his fist into Sergey’s chest as the momentum from the starving, eager vampires shoved him forward. His fist buried deep, the long extended claws at least four inches long, he dug for the withered, blackened heart of the master vampire.
Sergey screamed out his fury, raking at Luther’s eyes and neck as he pulled back, closing down his chest with razor-like blades in an effort to chop off his lieutenant’s arm before it could grasp the heart and extract it. The lesser vampires threw themselves on the ground right under the feet of the two combatants, licking at the blood pool, heedless of the danger to them from the reaching tentacles.
The poisonous spider’s web went crazy. It was stretched across several trees, a very effective guardian to the entrance to the underground lair beneath the forest. The long threads swayed and rocked, reaching in every direction, looking for anything unwary enough to get close so they could attach themselves to it and pull it into the center of the web where it could feast.
The tentacles had to be sticky or have suction cups on them because two of the crawling vampires licking frantically at the black blood were gripped, rolled fast and dragged up and into the web where hundreds of threads locked them in place. The feeder tubes jammed into their still-intact flesh and blood spurted, drawing the attention not only of the newly made vampires but of the master vampires as well. The scent of blood permeated the air.
Sergey and Luther narrowly escaped the thrashing threads. Ferro caught sight of Edward Varga backing far away from the fray, answering the puzzle as to how he had survived for so long. He was the same coward, looking after himself and disappearing when he thought he could get away with it. Sergey’s four guards circled cautiously, trying to find a way to get to him without putting themselves in danger of being eaten by the protector of the lair.
Sedrick Overtower hooked one of the hapless newly made vampires, still with red blood in his veins, and pulled him away from the others, dragging him across the ground, heedless of the rocks and debris. He skirted around the combatants, continuing to tow the doomed vampire across the uneven ground and into the trees, away from the opening that led to the lair.
He crouched down, tore into the neck of the starving vampire and began to consume him. Immediately, crows made their way down from the higher branches to hop across the ground, pecking at the kicking, screaming vampire, tearing strips of flesh from the bones. Sedrick didn’t seem to mind sharing the flesh, as long as he was able to drain the last of the blood from the veins.
“You will be still, Luther,” Sergey commanded. “Remove your fist from my chest.”
Ferro heard the gift in the Malinov voice. One of his older Malinov brothers was reputed to be able to command others to do whatever he ordered, not just human but Carpathians and humans alike. Ferro hadn’t believed it. Now, hearing that beguiling note in Sergey’s voice, he could almost believe it was true. Luther didn’t obey, but he hesitated. That was enough to tip the battle in Sergey’s favor and warn all the brethren that Sergey had a few tricks of his own up his sleeve.
Sergey struck hard, ripping Luther’s heart from his chest and tossing it into the air. One of his guards called lightning down and incinerated it. Sergey stepped back and indicated Luther’s falling body. The lightning forked and jumped to the body, burning it as well. Just like that, Sergey seemed in good spirits again, although, watching him, Ferro could see he was tense and not in the least bit at ease the way he wanted the others to think he was.
The moment lightning lit up the night sky, Sedrick was on his feet, abandoning the vampire in the forest to the crows. Varga made his way back quickly to press close, as if he’d been there all along. Sergey kicked at the remaining newly made vampires.
“Get up before I feed you to the puppets, or our guardian.” The web seemed satisfied with the two men it was devouring. Their piercing cries seemed to make Sergey even happier. He did nothing to silence them, although the sound carried across the lake, far into the night.
He kicked viciously at the vampires on the ground and they crawled hastily out of his way before stumbling to their feet. Sergey stood in front of the web, his guards by his side, and waved aside the dangling strands of the web. One master vampire moved up in front of him and another dropped behind him. The other two flanked him on either side.
Ferro could see why the entrance was so large. It had been deliberately made that way so it was safer for the vampires to pass through when their guardian was in a feeding frenzy. He drifted closer, Sandu, Petru and Benedek closing ranks so they were in tight formation, almost on the very heels of the master vampires. They had to time their entry so the vampires wouldn’t feel them, yet be close enough that the guardian wouldn’t, either. They couldn’t stir so much as a drop of air and had to move in perfect sync with the vampires as they entered the lair.
Nothing smelled as bad as a vampire’s lair. When many vampires shared the same lair, the stench was overwhelming, even to the most hardened of Carpathian hunters. They might not feel emotion, but they had a heightened sense of smell. They were predators, and like any predator, their senses were acute, no matter what form they took.
The passage may have started out narrow, but over time it had been widened, and now three grown men could easily walk side by side down the steps hewn out of the dirt and root systems to the floor below. Someone knowledgeable in engineering had designed and fortified the underground fortress. There was a series of smaller rooms to the front that presumably housed victims the vampires kept alive to feed off of for long periods of time.
As they floated past the rooms with the open doors, the brethren could see evidence of captivity, the chains and smears of old blood left behind with echoes of screams still encased in the dirt of the walls and flooring. There were no prisoners, and hadn’t been for some time. Either Sergey hadn’t been using this lair for very long, or he had abandoned the practice of keeping his food alive and close while he worked at retrieving Elisabeta.
The hallway ended abruptly, spilling into a large circular room cut out beneath the forest. The vampires had made an effort to make it comfortable, even somewhat livable, with chairs for the master vampires o
n a raised dais and more scattered around for the lesser vampires following them. The pawns sat on the floor, not yet worthy of a chair.
Ferro and the others exchanged notes on the master vampires entering the room with Sergey. Two of them were cousins of the Malinov brothers. Cornel and Dorin were often seen with their five cousins when they were young, preferring to stay in the background. They were quiet but skilled hunters, a force to be reckoned with from early on when they hunted vampires. Still, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they followed their cousins and made the decision to turn. The members of the Malinov family were close and they believed themselves superior to the Dubrinsky family—those who ruled the Carpathian people.
The Astor family had always followed the Malinovs. As children, Georg, Fridrick and Addler had hung around them, and when they were first learning to hunt, they followed the direction of one of the older Malinov brothers. They had all been good hunters, although unlike Cornel and Dorin, the Astors were on the flamboyant side. At times they had gone so far as to act in theaters in various countries, choosing small stages where they could perform, be stars, and then when they had gotten enough accolades to pander to their vanity, they would stalk any critics and drain them of their blood, sometimes killing their families slowly in front of them first. They needed attention constantly, and following someone like Sergey had to be difficult for them. Georg and Fridrick had been killed recently by Tariq and the others in their fight against the vampires, but Addler had survived.
Addler was a smart, colorful vampire, very reminiscent of the man he had once been. Unlike the others, he kept himself looking fairly decent, even though there were no humans to fool. He wore a suit with a purple shirt and black stripes. Ferro could see that his once handsome face would appeal to modern women. He had always been a good hunter, even as a young man, a careful student of the Malinovs, and apparently, he still was.
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