The Vampire's Rebirth (Fatal Allure Book 11)

by Martha Woods

  “The fact that it wasn’t a week at most is the most surprising, but I guess if everything is dark then you might not be able to see everything properly. Even though vampires are naturally good at seeing in the dark, being that it’s the only time that they can be up and about safely. Wow, how are you even still alive?”

  “Not for lack of people trying to kill me, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh most definitely,” Damon said, “Now I’m just surprised that you could see all of them coming, since you couldn’t even focus on a puddle for three decades.”

  As much as I was looking forward to seeing barbs fly back and forth, I could see the warehouse that the werewolves hung around looming in front of us, still showing signs of the latest party that they’d held to try and get closer with whoever from the alliance decided to show up. They’d been holding one every three days, clearly something was working in that case, I would have to show up to one sometime if this meeting didn’t end in them trying to kill me.

  Maybe even then, they were apparently pretty good parties.

  “Hey,” I said, poking Damon in his side with my elbow, “The two of you should get ready, if Tariq is hurt then I want us to be able to get him out of there as fast as we can.”

  “You think he’s going to be hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, but I want to be sure in case. I’m sure everything is going to be fine, we’ve been saying that for how long now?” Pulling the car up outside the front gate, I took a deep breath and undid my seat belt. “Let’s just get in there ok? I want to know just what the holdup is if it isn’t anything violent, what could possibly make someone like Tariq impatient? It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?”

  “He has the patience of a saint, they must be really testing it.”

  There weren’t any sounds of fighting coming from inside as we approached, or even yelling for that matter, no doubt they’d already smelt us when we’d parked, but laying in wait wasn’t really their style if they were going to attack. The front doors to the warehouse pushed open in front of us, and though part of me regretfully tensed up in anticipation of needing to defend myself, as soon as I saw the smile stretching across the absolutely giant woman stepping out to greet us I knew that there was no need to do anything of the sort.

  “Ah, you’ve finally arrived,” She said, arms wide and her voice booming with such power that I could almost feel it in my chest, “We’ve been talking in circles for hours now, it’s about time that we had another voice to weigh in on all of this.”

  “Talking in circles?” I asked, accepting the invitation to join her at her side and starting our way inside the warehouse, “You and Tariq?”

  “That’s right, and he seems very troubled by some of the information that we’ve had to give him. He came here asking us for help, and that would be no problem at all for us, we’re just as committed to this alliance as the rest of you are, but we can’t start in good faith unless everyone knows what we know about this enemy.”

  “Information? About the shifters that coming to attack the city? You know things about them?”

  She grinned, that signature, full set of werewolf fangs on full display even in her human form. “We know quite a lot about them actually, come and sit and we will tell you all about them.”

  Walking through a series of hallways and staircases, I realized that we were actually going deeper underground as we went, but this wasn’t exactly unusual. They had their offices in the basement level, likely to drown out any of the noise from the parties that were constantly going on upstairs, even werewolves had a sense of business after all. What was worrying me however was the fact that not only did they have actual information about this enemy that we were facing, but whatever it was was enough to trouble even Tariq, who had remained calm and collected even in the direst of circumstances in my experience.

  Whatever it was, it had to be very serious to elicit that kind of reaction.

  “And here we are!” She said, pushing the door open and revealing a very tired looking Tariq sitting with a cup of coffee and his fingers on his temples, “Oh come on Tariq, don’t be so dramatic!”

  “I’m not being dramatic, what you’ve come to tell us is absolutely terrible news. What I’m having is the appropriate reaction for hearing it.” He looked up at me, giving a weak smile and a small wave. “Hi Amy.”

  “Hey Tariq,” I said, walking over and hugging him lightly, “You look terrible.”

  “And I feel just the same, why don’t you have a seat and you can have the exact same feeling as I do.”

  Damon and Vincent stayed at the door, mainly because there was only one seat left for me to take, but also because from the jittering of their legs it was obvious that they wouldn’t be able to relax properly. At least if they were standing up they would be able to pass off their nervousness as vigilance.

  “Well come on, come on, have a seat,” Our host told me, “My name is Christine, I don’t think we’ve ever really spoken that much.”

  “No, we haven’t. I… don’t think that I’ve ever spoken to just one representative for the werewolves either.”

  “We like to shuffle things around when it comes to things like that, everyone has a different way of speaking and handling things, we want to show that we’re a well-rounded group of people,” She laughed, “And also for the most part we find politics incredibly boring, I wouldn’t want to subject any one of us to more than we need to. We can share the load this way.”

  “Well that’s… thanks for your honesty.” I took the seat, accepting the cup of coffee that she passed my way and nodding my head in gratitude. “I hope that this isn’t the last time that we talk though, it’s nice to have a familiar face to speak to sometimes.”

  “Well, I suppose that will all depend on how interesting this all is, won’t it?” Sitting behind her desk and throwing her feet up, she stretched her arms above her head and actually strained the fabric across her shoulders. Even if I didn’t know that she was a werewolf for sure, it wouldn’t take long to figure it out. She was intimidatingly strong, I was glad to have her on my side. “Now, where should we start?”

  “I think… we should probably start at the beginning, don’t you?”

  “Very well, very well, hope that you’re comfortable in that chair. I’ve been meaning to get better ones in here sooner or later, but that one will have to make do.” Sighing deeply and pulling her desk drawer out, Christine pulled out a bunch of papers haphazardly gathered into what was clearly a completely disorganized pile. Not everyone had a system of organization like me it seemed. “Let’s see, I’ve got a report somewhere in here from some of the newer members that we picked up over the years. Whenever someone new joins up with us I like to get their story, get an idea of whether or not they’re on the run from anyone, if they’ve been a part of anything particularly awful, that sort of thing, but hearing that shifters were on the way here made me remember a few stories that I wrote down a few years ago.”

  “You write down details on every member by hand?” I leaned closer, seeing that it wasn’t limited to one page per member either. These were getting very in depth, it was impressive.

  “If everyone comes through me then they have a face to recognize, it makes us all closer.” She smiled, flipping through paper after paper. “Besides, I like to know personally who I’m allowing into my clan, I don’t want any outsiders who think that they can dictate the way everyone else thinks and acts to come in and screw around with everyone else. We’re growing, but we’re still small, we need to look out for our own.”

  “Well, you’re not quite alone anymore, are you?”

  She looked up at me for a moment, nodding in agreement before looking back to her hands. “I suppose we’re not, it’s going to take some getting used to though.”

  “It felt strange when I first met you as well, but my wife bridged the gap between us.” Tariq shifted in his seat, taking the last gulp of his coffee before setting the cup down. “You’ll do fine, just think of
it as having more friends than usual.”

  “Oh that I do,” She said, pulling out a set of documents from the pile, “That I do. Here are the testimonies.”

  I was anxious to hear what she had been told, if it was enough to intensely worry Tariq and to still be on Christine’s mind after all these years, clearly it had to be the exact opposite of good. Only way to find out was to hear it though, wasn’t it?

  “Here we go, I talked to this particular wolf about… five years ago.” She ran the name through her mind, recalling events and times that I would never know of. “I believe that he is dead now, but that happened after we parted ways. He came to us telling of a group of shifters that moved in the dead of night and seems to swallow entire groups whole, in fact the entire reason that he had come to us in the first place was that his clan had disappeared overnight and he was the only one left.”

  “His whole clan?” I asked, “How did… were they just as capable as you were?”

  “I have no doubt that they were, but they were also far more isolated. He told me that this happened far up in the mountains where there are no signs of human life for miles at a time, the perfect time and place for someone to go missing without a trace. But when we mounted a search for them, with him leading us to the place where they had been camped for months beforehand, we didn’t find a single sign that anyone had ever been there at all.”

  “Not one? Did they just… how can you just erase someone like that?”

  “No doubt by having someone skilled at getting rid of signs of their own existence, but I would only think of that months later. At the time I was content enough to think like many others that he was just crazed and stressed from hunters killing his clan or whatever it could have been. We took him in and gave him what support we could, but eventually he grew disillusioned and wanted answers, so he split off from us and went his separate way.” Reaching into a bag taped to the document, she pulled out a single fang. “This is what we found of him a year later when we got word that he had been spotted, we never found anything else.”

  “That feels like hunters,” Damon chimed in, “We don’t like to leave a body behind, if the regular world stumbled across a werewolf corpse then the masquerade would be broken, and every other supernatural would come out of the woodwork to defend themselves when humanity decided to take up arms.”

  “Ah, you’re a hunter then?”

  “Used to be, not really anymore. But I can tell you with a certainty that it was a hunter that killed that wolf, but whether it was a hunter or the hunter I can’t say.”

  “I agree, and if this was the only connection that I could find then I would think that he was just crazy and that there was never really any group of shifters out there terrorizing innocent werewolves, but they were not the only one to come forward over the years.”

  “How many others are there?” I asked, “Over the years, I mean.”

  “Dozens, but only a few of them have given any good information other than whispers and rumors, helpful as those can be sometimes. Here’s another one, from a young wolf that is still with us today, though we sent him off to contact other clans around the country, he joined us only last year.”

  The paper for his was much longer, evidently he had a lot of things to say to them before he had been accepted. That was good news for us in terms of knowledge, but I wouldn’t know if the rest of it was good until I heard it. From the look on Tariq’s face however, this was the major source of his anxiety.

  “‘When I came back through the forest, it was like I was in another place entirely,’” She read, “‘Everything that had been my home once was gone, some of my family had made it out but I wouldn’t know that until weeks later. It’s been months since then, and all I can think of is the look that the leader had in his eyes. Eyes like darkness itself, eyes like you could see the end written in them.’ He’s very evocative, always likes to paint a picture with his stories.”

  “He’s succeeding,” I said, “What else does he have to say?”

  “‘I stayed hidden in the brush, I thought that they might be able to smell me but there were so many werewolves already dead that it would have been impossible to pick me out. I’m ashamed that I didn’t fight back but… if I was I know that I wouldn’t be here today. I’m here because I’m a coward.”

  “Sounds a bit harsh on himself, what else could he possibly have done if everyone else was dead?”

  “That’s what I told him, I have to admit that I was disappointed that he didn’t at least try but… not every death is a worthy one, dying for honor still means dying, and if he had died there it is likely that he would have died unmourned. His feelings on everything were secondary though, I couldn’t find the words to comfort him because he just kept on talking, and what he had to say about the leader is very interesting for us.”

  She cleared her throat, pushing forward a few out of focus photographs that had clearly been taken by a cellphone. “‘I got some pictures of the leader, because I don’t think you would believe me unless you had actual proof to look at. The leader of these shifters is a hunter, the things that he was doing and the efficiency that he organized everyone with, there’s no doubt about it. I would bet my life on the fact that they’ve taken in a hunter and let him lead them, but for what reason and how likely this all is I have no words for.’”

  Picking up the photographs just cemented that yes, this was very much the same man that I had seen in that other photograph only yesterday, still standing just as tall with just as commanding an aura about him. You could tell just by looking at him that he was a dangerous man, there was no doubt about that.

  “The things that he saw this man do were no doubt the actions of a hunter, with all the efficiency and pragmatism of a seasoned one too. If this is the same man that is going to be coming here to attack the people that you have just taken in, there is no doubt going to be one hell of a fight to be had. Maybe he can be reasoned with, but I highly doubt it, especially with… the last thing that I have to tell you.”

  “The last thing? All of this has been pretty helpful, what could the last thing be?”

  “This is more of a rumor that I heard whispered around the clan, some of the more paranoid members who haven’t quite gotten used to the lifestyle yet, but with everything else… I feel like there is a degree of truth to be held in this rumor, in motivation if nothing else.”

  “Don’t leave us in suspense,” Vincent said, “Whatever it is that you feel you need to tell us, don’t think that we don’t want to hear it.”

  “Very well,” She said, nodding slowly, “There were rumblings years ago of some of our elders who disappeared for a few months, no word on where they had gone in the meantime, and no mention of where they had been when they finally made their reappearance. Going by the dates that they had left and the information that the shifter gave to you, I’m fairly certain that they were involved with the clan dispute that got this enemy banished in the first place. But that is not the concerning part for me.”

  Shifting in her seat, her expression morphed from that easy confidence to a hardened seriousness, any jest or good humor that she had held before was now gone. This was definitely bad news.

  “Some of us did the same thing ten years ago, disappearing and reappearing with no information on what they had been doing. This was at the same time that this hunter is reported to have gone missing, and it is here that the rumors start. Word has been passed around, and I have no idea where or from who this started, but when the hunter was attacked and hunted himself, he did not die, nor did he vanish from the country like a cat with its tail between its legs. He dragged himself for forty miles, with injuries so severe that they would have killed even the foolhardiest creature among us, all from the power of pure anger. Anger that he had been outdone, anger that he had been forced to retreat, anger that his fellow man hadn’t been there for him in the first place. But even then, anger alone wasn’t what saved him.”

  “What saved him?” I asked,
and if I seemed utterly drawn into the story it was because I was.

  “He spent sometime in the forest, doomed to rot away into nothingness before a woman found him, with the teeth of a bear and the strong spirit of a leader, and though she initially planned to kill him where he lay she thought differently. Perhaps she saw a kindred spirit, maybe she saw an opportunity, we will never truly know, but regardless of the reason, she dragged him to safety.”

  “I imagine that he wasn’t very happy about that.”

  “Absolutely not. When he first awoke and saw who was looking over him, he thought he was going to be killed. In the moment, he welcomed it too, but it was denied of him as she fed him and regained his strength. They had both been shaped by loss, and though it seemed impossible, they could feel something almost like… friendship forming between them. As the months passed by and his wounds healed, he found that he could have left at any time, an act that she would have allowed with no resistance. But to his surprise, he found that he didn’t want to.”

  “He wanted to stay with her,” Damon said,” He saw that she was different.”

  “Yes, and though it confused him, he didn’t want to part ways with the shifter. So he began to ask her where she had come from, what she had been doing, what she had done. And as she began to answer each of his questions, he found himself starting to fall for her.”

  “I’m sorry, he what?” Damon was honestly speaking for all of us, especially in what he asked next, “Who did you even hear this from, how do they know this?”

  “It’s funny, whenever you ask where they heard it from, they say that they heard it from someone else, then when you ask that person they say that they heard it from someone else again, and you keep going through the line until you find that the person they heard it from doesn’t even exist anymore, but they had to of at one point for them to hear it in the first place.” She chuckled, letting her head fall forward slightly, “I’ve been looking for the person who started this rumor for so long and I’ve never been able to find them, it’s just a dead end that leads to nowhere. But in spite of that, I can’t see anything that makes the story not true, especially in regards to his utterly tenacious attitude in killing the rest of us.”