by Heather Knox
The Longest Night
Vampire Wars: Book #3
abdopublishing.com
Published by EPIC Press, a division of ABDO, PO Box 398166, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55439. Copyright © 2019 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc. International copyrights reserved in all countries. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. EscapeTM is a trademark and logo of EPIC Press.
Printed in the United States of America, North Mankato, Minnesota.
052018
092018
Cover design by Candice Keimig
Images for cover and interior art obtained from iStockphoto.com
Edited by Jennifer Skogen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932897
Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Knox, Heather, author.
Title: The longest night/ by Heather Knox
Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2019 | Series: Vampire wars; #3
Summary: In an attempt to thwart the Praedari’s kidnapping of another captive, Delilah finds in Zeke’s killer an unlikely ally—and a myth made manifest. With the Valkyrie’s help, Delilah finds herself nabbed by the Praedari, only to realize she’s been here before. Kiley learns from her what fate awaits them all at Project Harvest, and Anonymous declares war on the Everlasting.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781680769067 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 9781680769340 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Vampires--Fiction. | War--Fiction--Fiction. | Kidnapping--Fiction--Fiction. |
Delayed memory--Fiction | Young adult fiction.
Classification: DDC [FIC]--dc23
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.
For Sylvia Quinn
“I’M GLAD YOU DECIDED TO GET CHECKED OUT BY OUR doctor, Logan—though I apologize that with all the commotion surrounding our most recent arrival he wasn’t able to pay a visit to your suite,” Victor says, offering a small, sympathetic smile. He waves to Hunter and Kiley. Hunter makes a show of unpacking in the suite as the doors close behind Logan and Victor with their trademark whoosh.
Once in the hallway, Logan shrugs. “I play football so it’s worth making sure no real damage was done,” he responds, just as Kiley coached him.
“Well, if you find you’re craving a workout during recovery—and the doctor clears it—maybe you could pitch in around the ranch. It would get you some escorted outside time. I’d have to find adequate security for you, but I’m sure it could be arranged.”
“During the day?” Logan asks, a bit more eagerly than he’d like. “I mean, because you’re all . . . you know . . . ”
Victor chuckles. “Sure. We’d start you on a night team so I could be around—for your safety—but there are plenty of mortals who work here at all times of the day.” He pauses. “Our staff is compensated quite well for their nontraditional living situation—and many others are volunteers. I know it’ll probably be difficult for the three of you for a while, being thrust into this without your consent, but there really is a place for you here if you give it a shot.”
Right, Logan thinks. As dinner. But he keeps his thoughts to himself as Victor escorts him down the corridors leading to the infirmary. In this part of the facility the floors gleam almost too-white in the fluorescent lighting, clinical, emphasizing the bright silvery-steel of the doors they pass. Quiet, besides the sound of doors like the one to their suite sliding open with a soft, metallic whoosh and the occasional click of shoes on the tile somewhere out of sight. Quiet, besides his breathing and Victor’s attempts at friendly chatter that Logan finds difficult to respond to without animosity, opting for the occasional grunt and half-hearted nod. Quiet, besides muscle memory—that crash of fear in the chest as he was run off the road by fanged strangers just the night before and abducted—screaming at him to run, just run.
Victor looks to him expectantly as they stop in front of a set of polished, nearly seamless steel doors, much like the others but with a touchscreen, digital numerical keypad, and full digital keyboard. In addition to its various inputs, the apparatus boasts an impressive array of scanners—the retina one like for entry into their suite, what could be a fingerprint ID, places to both swipe and tap an ID card, and other scanners Logan can’t identify the purpose of.
“Fancy,” he comments gruffly, gesturing to the console.
“Some of the equipment the medical team has requested for research is quite expensive—we’re talking beyond what the military has access to, very privatized and highly controversial—but when Doctor Larkin stipulated it as a condition of his employment during contract negotiations I found it hard to say no. Others fought it, but I insisted,” he explains into the retina scanner after punching in a sequence of characters on the digital keyboard that Logan couldn’t catch.
“Because he’s the best?”
“That, and because the research he’s doing is important. For us, and for you. But here we are.” He grins as a set of heavy steel doors slides open, not with a soft whoosh but with a series of beeps, revealing a second set. Another console, boasting the same inputs and scanners as the first, lights up with the face of an older gentleman. This man has salt-and-pepper hair (more salt than pepper) and his hazel eyes are alight. There’s a flush to his cheeks as though he’d just rushed in from the outdoors and to the console to greet them. He breathes heavily between exclamations.
“Victor, my boy!” he greets them with surprising warmth. “Is this my patient?”
“Sure is. Doctor Larkin, this is Logan. He got a bit banged up by the extraction team.”
“Ah, yes! Their handiwork will make sure I earn my salary this quarter it seems!”
“Sorry, doc,” Victor apologizes, running his hand through his short hair, brow furrowed.
“Nothing to be sorry for—this is why you hired me!”
“Still, it’s not your job to clean up their messes . . . How is Charlotte, by the way?”
The old man on the screen waves away Victor’s polite protests with a smile. “She’s stable. Remarkable, really. I’ll send you the full report, of course.” He pauses, studying Logan through the video screen. “His leg, I take it? And his back, by the looks of it.”
“Yeah, how did you—” Logan starts but Doctor Larkin interrupts. He still walks gingerly, though most of this charade served to get him here to see Charlotte—but never, not even to Kiley and Hunter, had he mentioned his back bothering him after the accident.
“The way you’re standing, son. You’re lopsided. Now, some people are just lopsided but not most. You’ve got good bones, I can see, so you’re not usually lopsided, are ya? Are ya, son? Lopsided, I mean?”
Logan involuntarily stands upright in response, raising an eyebrow at Victor who coughs to stifle a laugh. “Uh, no. No sir, I’m not usually . . . lopsided.”
The old man takes a half-step away from the monitor and looks behind him a moment before addressing Logan and Victor once again in the screen. “Anyway, come on in. Looks like the, uh, little mess we made patching Charlotte up is all taken care of. Medicine can be a sticky business!” He laughs at his own attempt at a joke. “Now Victor, you know the rule.”
Victor holds his hands up in faux surrender. “Wouldn’t dream of breaking it, Doctor. I’m just his escort. Call me when you’re finished with him.”
“No vampires in my infirmary,” he explains, Logan presumes for his benefit. “Can’t heal an undead patient . . . ” He laughs again, shaking his head. “I tried. It was a disaster.”
Victor shrugs at Logan before turning again down the corridor from which they’d come. He turns his attention again to the screen as the doctor clears his thr
oat.
“Come in, come in,” he says waving his hand as one might at a child you’re trying to get out the door after it took them twenty minutes to put on their shoes. “Don’t got all day, son. Girly here’s coming to but I can squeeze you in. She’s rough . . . real rough,” he adds with a grin.
The doors open and Doctor Larkin meets him, guiding him hurriedly by the shoulder inside.
“Put up a good fight, that one did,” he says gesturing to a girl in her teens lying on one of the beds, eyes closed. The slow, steady rise and fall of her chest confirms to Logan that at least she lives despite how washed out she looks underneath the harsh lighting of the infirmary—sickly against the blond of her hair, still matted with blood.
“How ‘bout you? That how you got hurt?”
“Eh, not as much,” Logan admits, ashamed, unable to look away from her. “They ran my car off the road and I got banged up in the accident. What happened to her?”
“Gunshots to the abdomen, stomach, chest. Bad, real bad.”
He guides Logan to a bed in the adjoining room to that of the girl, not bothering to draw the curtains despite the observation window.
“Alright, drop ’em.”
“What?”
“Your pants, drop ’em. Can’t look at your knee if I can’t see it.”
“Uh, right,” Logan says, unzipping his jeans and letting them slip from his waist to his ankles.
“If you’re shy you shoulda wore shorts, son. She’s groggy, won’t remember past the blood haze. Don’t worry.”
The doctor cups Logan’s heel in his hand, gently pushing and pulling his leg to test his range of motion.
“Blood haze?”
“Poor girl’d be dead if I didn’t have all these corpses walking around with their super-blood pumping in their veins. That hurt?” he says, jabbing a bony finger into the soft flesh behind the kneecap. Logan winces. “Guess so,” he laughs. “Anyway, that IV,” he gestures to the tube attached at the inside of the girl’s elbow, through which Logan now notices red liquid rather than clear flowing there. “It’s going in, not out—and that’s not medicine.”
“So you’re turning her into a vampire?” Logan demands, eyes wide.
“You’ve seen too many movies, son. A little vampire blood won’t make you one. That bag is diluted, of course, a custom blend of vampire blood and human blood of her blood type. That blood has allowed her body to regenerate almost as well as one of these corpses could.” He beams up at Logan as he knocks him on the knee evoking a solid kick in reflex. Logan grunts. “Wasn’t sure it would work, truth be told—but she made incredible strides dayside.”
“Dayside?”
“During the day—keep up, son.”
“You experimented on her?” Logan asks, vowing to not miss a beat after the reprimand.
“It’s not like it’s a shade of lipstick on a monkey or pumping rats full o’ saccharine. Victor asked me to save her life, so I did.”
“So she’s going to be okay?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions,” he says, standing and turning to one of the cabinets.
“I, uh, well—” Logan fumbles.
Doctor Larkin returns to his side, knee brace and tan cloth in hand. He waves away Logan’s failed attempt at speech. “Save it. I would, too, if I were you. She’ll be fine. Better than fine, for a while, no telling how long. Then she’ll be normal again. Straighten your leg.” He slips the tan bandage-sock over Logan’s calf up to his knee.
“So whose blood did you give her? Victor’s?”
Doctor Larkin jostles Logan’s leg as he adjusts the brace, the sound of Velcro punctuating Logan’s question.
“Just some blood from the bank,” he shrugs, patting Logan’s knee hard enough to make him scowl a moment. “Good as new! Well, you will be. Just keep that on for a bit when you’re walking around. You can take it off to sleep and to ice it. Your profile said you’re an athlete?”
Logan nods.
“Then you probably know how to R.I.C.E, right? Rest, ice, compress, elevate? Shoulda had you come in right away, but anyway, ice it for about twenty minutes every hour or two until this time tomorrow. Walk around a bit when you’re not icing it, ibuprofen for the slight swelling. You’ll be fine, just some jarred tissue from the impact. Of course, we could speed it up . . . ” The doctor’s gaze shifts to Charlotte in her bed, a sparkle in his eye.
Logan follows the doctor’s gaze to the girl, tube in her arm transferring the red of their captors into her veins. On the metal surgical tray on the table next to her bed a package of clean bandages and a fresh spool of tape waits. Nearby, the small red bin marked Biohazard struggles to contain the mound of white-and-red that threatens to spill over. He wonders how many similar packages she bled through, how quickly, and how much of that blood was hers? How much of what’s inside her is hers?
“I’ll stick with ice,” he responds with a shudder, wondering if the girl would have given consent—or if it would have mattered.
The doctor sighs. “A pity. I’ll have Victor bring you by tomorrow night so I can take another look at the bruising.” He guides Logan to the first set of doors and punches some keys—the last few numbers he recognizes as being the number Victor gave them to contact him with their tablets or the in-room com system. “Who knows? Maybe Sleeping Beauty here will be better company then.”
EZEKIEL THE SEEKER.
The honorific rings in my ears, resonating through the tightly-woven network of my veins, nearly electric. My beast sniffs at the shift within, snorts in disgust, in warning, nostrils flaring. This predator-self has no use for these shackles of status we impose upon it: a custom of the Keepers shunned by the Praedari for this reason. My title, bestowed by the Council of Keepers centuries ago—amazing how inconsequential a millennium-old tradition can appear to the outsider when stripped of its ceremony. Those of us who’ve earned such a title have grown weary of the burden, our albatross we bear until we are ash—and longer, for the truly unlucky. Memory haunts relentlessly.
The woman standing before me in the otherwise abandoned alley Victor and his men just left, holding sword and shield, makes no movement, yet I feel her presence swell to fill the void of the nearly-abandoned alley—a predator, but not of a type that my inner Beast recognizes, smelling faintly of the floral-sweet taint of some of the luckier Everlasting, but also of freshly-fallen snow. Where I expect this shadow-self to stalk and snarl and lunge as when met with danger, it instead sniffs and remains vigilant out of respect to the unknown, uncertain whether to show submission or dominance because neither me nor my shadow-self know which hierarchy should be the yardstick for measure.
Both her glow and that of the moon refract in the sword and shield which sometimes pulses to glow as she does, but also threatens to drip like molten metal, though their texture this close reveals wood grain for hilt, blade, and shield alike. She wears her red hair pulled away from her face in something like braids, but loose and messy in the back. With sharp features and full lips, I hesitate to call her beautiful; no, striking fits better, of similar stature as Delilah and with that same confidence. In another life she may have ruled an empire.
“Who’re you?” I demand again.
“I will not answer a question you full well know the answer to. To do so would demean both of us. I am here to offer you a choice, Seeker,” she says evenly.
The forgotten black bird caws before swooping in low from the dumpster, landing on the shoulder of the woman.
“You’re—”
The raven. The sword and shield. The way she stands, erect and untouchable, as if from not only another time, but another world.
“You may choose to continue living or you may choose to meet your Final Moment and allow me to bear you to Valhalla where the Chosen of the Slain await Ragnarok,” she interrupts.
“I did not think the Valkyries offered a choice,” I begin. “And this dirty alley is hardly a battlefield.”
She shrugs. “Times change and so must we
. The Praedari see this, embrace this. The Keepers, though—you cling to tradition, often to the detriment of your cause, but such blind stubbornness can be attractive. Can be useful.” She gestures around her. “Looks can be deceiving, Seeker. This was once a battlefield—and will be once again.”
“Why am I being offered a choice?”
“As I said, we’ve been watching you a long time. We are not opinion-less, though we refuse to be distracted by involvement in your war. Tell me,” she starts, cocking her head, “how would we choose from amongst the slain if no one died in battle? How would we find those einherjar, those warriors honorable enough and skilled enough to join us for the one, true battle at Vigrith—during Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods—if you did not fight here for something?”
“So it is true, that the Valkyries prepare for Ragnarok?”
She rolls her eyes and sighs, the first time her stoic countenance stumbles. “All of Asgard prepares—and has been since the beginning of time. Those warriors not worthy of Valhalla join Freya at Folkvangr—look, this is far more complicated than I have time to get into with you right now. I gave you your choice. Now make it.” Her jaw sets in a hard line, unwavering despite the earlier crack in the figurative mask she must bear as one of the Choosers of the Slain.
“The Keepers and the Praedari prepare for a war that has been gathering momentum for centuries,” I explain.
“And you are being offered this choice now. You think you have set the war between your sects in motion, but you have not. The Everlasting will hold their courts, will wither away and rot in their beds of inaction—”
“You speak like you are not one of us.”
“I am a Valkyrie. A long time ago I was one of the Everlasting but now I am something more. And I’m giving you the chance to become something more than what they’ve made you. If you refuse us now you may return to the night to await your battle and, should you fall, you may find yourself offered the hand of a Valkyrie again.” She steps towards me, her hand on the hilt of her sword but still. “But it is not often one of the Everlasting is offered a place in Valhalla, and it has never happened twice,” she warns.