Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  They were slow to answer, the uncertainty clear even from miles away. Eventually, all agreed and the motion was carried.

  The head of the council ended the conference with some final advice. “Girard, you’ve served this council well for a very long time, so I regret that I must say this. Destroy all evidence of the vampires there. Burn it all down…no matter what or who remains. Leave nothing.”

  He knew what she meant. She meant even at the cost of their lives. He nodded and said, “It will be done.”

  “We need our own plane,” Lila said from the back seat of the minivan. Behind them was a small caravan of other vans and minivans. It looked like a road trip to a kid’s soccer meet rather than a bunch of vampires going to battle.

  Marcus stopped playing with the entertainment system in the second row seat and said, “I agree. Let’s buy a plane!”

  Doran was driving and he turned on his blinker before shifting lanes, then said, “That’s actually not a bad idea. I mean, look at all this driving we’re doing.”

  Girard shook his head and said, “Let’s talk about that later. Let’s just get to the Long Island safe house and get everyone briefed.”

  “And then kill the bad guys,” Marcus added before putting his headphones back on. The noises of a movie leaked from the speakers, an action movie by the sound of it.

  If only it were as simple as killing the bad guys. Girard found ten additional complications for every one that he reasoned away. The vampires—assuming they were all old and mostly dumpers—didn’t care about consequences, which meant they could fight without concern for exposure. There was also the matter of pathogens. Who knows what they’d cooked up in that lab and how much of it there was? It was another whole level of danger they needed to face.

  And then there was the problem of the media and the CDC video. Government spokespeople were now firmly assuring the public that the video was a stunt, an elaborate bit of special effects to promote an upcoming movie. Girard knew what that really meant. It meant that they’d figured out it wasn’t some alien invasion and knew they had a problem right here on Earth, but didn’t want the public to panic. He couldn’t imagine what they’d told that poor man’s family.

  Dr. Greg had placed a call into the Guardian complex and let them know that an infectious disease report had been issued. This wasn’t all that abnormal in a general sense, but this one directed that all patients with a fever be checked for some very specific symptoms such as small lesions in the back of the throat and raised bumps along the heels of the patient’s hands. That meant they had looked at the body at CDC enough to know about the spots where vampire tendrils emerged.

  As they left the freeway and drove onto Long Island, he rolled down his window to feel the fresh air wash over him. Only near the ocean was the air like this. Salty and fresh, clean yet filled with life…perfect. Girard, like most vampires, had spent the majority of his life fearful of the ocean. A salty sea was their Achilles heel, so to speak. While marsh water could tranquilize them, salt water acted on their true bodies in exactly the same way it did any other freshwater species. Osmotic shock. Just as a freshwater fish would shrivel and die if put into salt water, so would any vampire exposed to it. Water would leach from their tissues until they were a shrunken dead thing.

  It was only a couple of hundred years ago that Girard overcame his fear and swam in the ocean for the first time. That instinctive flinching from the salt water eventually faded into a deep and abiding love of the ocean’s power to sooth. The smell of it now helped to calm him, if only the smallest bit, teasing some of the knots out of his stomach.

  Of course, the vampire parts of him still shrank back into his tissues to avoid contact with the saltwater, but that was fine. He was human when it came to the ocean and he loved that feeling.

  “Makes me want to grab a ship and sail for the sunset,” Marcus said, removing his headphones again. “I like this place. We have a home here? A palace?”

  Girard turned a little to look at him. “We have safe houses everywhere. This island is well populated, so we have this one disguised as an expensive summer rental. That makes all the people coming and going not so obvious.”

  Marcus grunted, then grinned. “When we get those throwbacks taken care of, I want a nice long spell here. With avocados every day. I love those things. Why did I not know about them? So delicious. Creamy and cool. Reminds me of my wife, you know. Avocadoes.”

  Lila squinched up her eyes at Girard and he tried not to laugh. Marcus might be the mighty Aurelius, but he probably also needed medication for his attention issues. Under his breath, Doran murmured, “Well, alrighty then.”

  “It’s just up here, turn past the blue house.”

  They bumped up onto the long driveway, thin drifts of sand crunching under their tires as they approached the large house just off the beach. Tall, spikey grasses and sand rather than neat landscaping made the entire area look natural and wild. This part of Long Island was a tiny oasis between cities, a pretty throwback to the days when this was a place of fishing boats and virgin land.

  “Wow, this is nice,” Doran commented as he watched the big house come into view. “I call dibs for Lila and me after Marcus is done.”

  Lila laughed and said, “It’s not like that. There are loads of rooms. You don’t get the whole house to yourself. We can go at the same time.”

  He made a face in the rearview mirror and that just made Lila laugh even harder. Marcus saw it and said, “They want the honeymoon special.”

  The van stopped and the second vehicle crunched up the drive behind them. Girard wished he could join in on their fun, but right now he had too much to worry about. He just hoped that Lila and Doran would have their time…whether a honeymoon or fling…once all this was done.

  Opening his door, the sound of the ocean rushed in, and he said, “Let’s do this.”

  24

  Nineteen vampires. That’s all they had. Would it be enough? Well, maybe it would, considering all the firepower they had with them. That and the element of surprise might be enough. All Girard knew at this point was that he was tired of waiting and he was sick of sharing the house—no matter how nice it was—with eighteen other vampires. They were antsy, half-ready and half-fearful. No matter how beautiful the setting, all that pent up emotion had made for a nerve-wracking few days.

  It hadn’t helped that one of the techs pouring over the leaked CDC imagery sent an annotated image over that provided yet one more shock. It hadn’t been obvious at first, but once Girard had seen it, he was amazed they hadn’t noticed it before. In those final frames as the vampire tried to wriggle free of its dead human, one of the many tentacles that broke off during the process appeared swollen. It was only after much parsing that a tech had finally realized the oversize tendril wasn’t a feeding or anchoring arm, but rather an ovipositor. Used by vampires to deliver eggs, in most vampires it was a tiny appendage capable of delivering something little larger than a cell down into the body to grow as a human.

  Without a human pregnancy, the ovipositor would enlarge with the egg as it grew, eventually releasing the ready-to-hatch baby into the water. The only problem with this? The ovipositor that throwback vampire possessed had a row of lumps in it, a row of eggs in the process of growth.

  Vampires couldn’t have more than one child at a time, couldn’t produce more than one egg. Ever. If a vampire-inhabited human got pregnant with twins, then one of those twins would be born human. It was rare, but it happened.

  What didn’t happen was what they saw on that single snapshot of film. Vampires didn’t produce an array of eggs. What did that mean? Aside from the obvious problem that those baby vampires had to go somewhere when they were born, it also meant these older forms of vampire could potentially reproduce at a rate that entirely eclipsed the modern version. The old and brutal could supplant the new and gentle by reproducing at a higher rate.

  It was more to worry about, more to fret over, more to drive home that they couldn’
t lose the upcoming battle. They had to win against Thalia if vampires were to survive.

  Borona was giving them their final briefing and then it would be time to go. Girard tried to listen without showing his worry. It wouldn’t help anyone to see him uncertain. It was nearing midnight, and while they had all slept earlier, it still felt late, like they should all be turning in for a good night’s rest.

  “So, we’ve been watching for three days and we’re still seeing the exact same pattern. They sleep in shifts, with most of them sleeping during the shift starting soon. Two vampires are always on duty in here—which has to be their lab based on heat signatures. Our thermal monitor across the street still shows eight vampires, but there have been nine inside before. We’re not sure where that one goes when it’s not here. That vampire isn’t security, because we’ve got the area covered, but based on the size, we’re thinking that’s Thalia. Every time that one shows up, there’s a car parked here with a human driver, which makes sense if it’s Thalia. There are only humans beyond that particular warehouse and the area isn’t exactly crowded. Lots of condemned places, illicit activity, a few homeless, but even that’s fairly limited. This entire area—annotated by the red line around the buildings here—is condemned due to toxic material leeching into the ground from old manufacturing. Not even drug dealers want to hang around places like that. That means we’ve got less to worry about where witnesses are concerned. We’ve got a backup feeding crew coming in, just in case there are witnesses. Any human that sees will forget everything as long as the crew gets them before too much time has passed. They’ll be stationed over here, well away from the action.”

  Doran, who was acting as their expert on biological topics, asked, “And we’re sure they haven’t got another lab? We’re sure they haven’t moved any finished product?”

  With a shrug, Borona said, “Not that we’ve seen. No boxes or anything like that have left, only deliveries being made. It looks like they’re just getting started. We got lucky that she didn’t keep her head down. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known any of this was going on.”

  That was all good news. Girard’s primary concern was to contain whatever evil thing Thalia and her gang of vampires were cooking up. What was bad was that Thalia didn’t stay there and they were all left to wonder what she did when she wasn’t there. Did she have other cells? Did she have more labs? Was she simply making the rounds of all her labs and splitting her time?

  It was hard to even begin to guess what she might be up to. Everything they thought they knew had been turned on its head. Vampires didn’t rise in groups, dumpers didn’t exist, vampires definitely didn’t make war on humans…all of that known and common wisdom didn’t work when it came to Thalia. She very well might have other cells and they wouldn’t know until humans started dying from some horrific disease.

  His train of thought was interrupted by Lila’s hand on his arm. She looked at him, sympathy in her eyes, and said, “Don’t dwell. Everything will be fine. I just know it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m ready for life. It has to work out.”

  Girard felt almost naked, readying himself to enter a huge building armed with something resembling an oversized water gun. Well, it was a water gun that worked on vampires, but still. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of lead-spewing regular weapons, because everyone had those too, but the truth was that a vampire inhabited body wouldn’t drop like a regular human. Even a brain shot didn’t always do the trick right away. It would kill the body, yes, but a vampire could operate that body like a puppet for a few critical moments.

  And those moments were very critical indeed.

  “One minute to breach,” Doran said through the earpiece in Girard’s ear. Doran was acting as communicator at the command vehicle, which was probably good because if there was any person here less suited for military operations than Girard, it would be Doran. He heard the same words echoed through the earpieces of the two men near him. These two vampires were Guardians from the Nebraska complex. They’d been recruited for this mission along with several others from that complex due to their military histories. Both were big men, far bigger than Girard, and they had those steely gazes and taut movements only the truly experienced possessed.

  He hated to admit it, but Girard felt a lot better with them next to him.

  Girard had argued that it would be safer in the long run to simply blow up the entire warehouse complex, but had been overridden by the Council. Without knowing for sure what Thalia was creating and if this building was the only place she was creating it, they needed to know precisely what was going on inside.

  Then they could blow it up.

  “Breach!” The word was said calmly, but the adrenaline rush kicked in anyway. This wasn’t Girard’s signal to move, but rather meant for the breach teams. Two nearly simultaneous bangs from the curb sounded out as valves opened on the big trucks labeled as sewage retrieval vehicles. No sewage sucking was intended, but rather four big hoses would even now be spewing an extremely concentrated version of the marshy, rosemary infused water that forced a vampire out of a human body.

  Breaking glass and shouts quickly followed the bangs, a few gunshots punctuating the action. At last, the channel opened and the hard breathing of the breach team leader—also from the Nebraska complex—came through Girard’s earpiece. His fists clenched as he waited for him to speak.

  Gunfire erupted, then a boom that could only come from a grenade. His stomach twisted at the sound. Would the vampires inside blow up the lab or in some way compromise it to let out pathogens? A yell cut off suddenly after another round of gunfire, then Girard felt the force of the water cannon against the wall where he stood. Water trickled out from under the door and he pushed one of the men next to him back, picking up the small tank for transporting vampires and moving it out of the way.

  The last thing he needed was for these two to wind up wriggling out of their bodies. They were suited up, but why take chances.

  At last, the voice of the breach team leader crackled through his earpiece. “Six down. Team Alpha, go for the outer lab. Bravo, sweep and clear.”

  The shorthand of the military trained teams made Girard feel better simply because it was so direct, utterly without wavering or indecision. Borona was on Alpha team, as well he should be given his experience. Even so, Girard felt responsible for the young vampire and his heart pounded in his chest, knowing that Borona was moving in for the most dangerous part of this mission. The lab—if that’s what it was—seemed to be almost a building inside a building. Whoever rigged up the inside of the warehouse understood containment procedures.

  On the downside, two vampires were always inside that barrier, and if the outer barrier were breached then only one barrier remained between the wider world and whatever Thalia was cooking up inside. It was dangerous on so many levels. Alpha team understood that if they were exposed in any way, they too would wind up outside their bodies. No chance of contamination in the human world could be permitted.

  At the very least anyone exposed would lose their bodies. Depending on what was found inside the building, they may be forfeiting their vampire lives as well.

  The very fabric of the building shook as gunfire erupted, the rapid firing of automatic weapons sending projectiles into the old concrete. A scream was cut off, then the words Girard had been waiting for finally came through. “Bring in the tanks! Hostiles neutralized!”

  Girard and the two men next to him pulled down their gas masks, then grabbed the big containers next to their feet and entered the building. Water and smoke filled the air. The gas masks would prevent them from being influenced by the marsh water that dripped from every surface and ran in small rivers along the pitted concrete, but they made Girard feel like his senses were dimmed and restricted his peripheral vision. The plastic gloves and suits would keep the water from touching their skin, but it kept them from moving quickly too.

  The breach team leader ran in his dir
ection with his gun pointed toward the ceiling. His voice had a tinny quality because of the mask. “They weren’t expecting us and most of them were asleep. I don’t see the primary subject, and the sweep is complete. She’s not here.”

  Girard nodded because he hadn’t really expected anything different. Thalia might have been using faulty logic while she hatched these plans, but she was still cagey enough to know that you never nest where an enemy might come looking for you. He shifted the tank in his hand and asked, “Where are they?”

  The vampires were in various states of nakedness, which is what Doctor Greg had called it when they were without a body. It was a private joke between them, but a description Girard felt entirely appropriate. It was like being naked. He remembered it personally as an exposed sensation accompanied by an urgent need to hurry up and get into the next body. Only once had Girard been left with no body to go into. Of course, he’d gone willingly to his punishment. To have it be done like this must be horrible.

  Pointing at two other vampires wriggling on the floor, he sent the two men with him to gather the criminals. Like a fish out of water, a vampire had a very limited time to live without either a body or water. They were aquatic creatures and couldn’t breathe air like this. The vampire in front of him was trying to roll so that its gills were in the puddle, but it couldn’t manage it. It looked helpless.

  It also looked like no vampire that Girard had ever seen.

  “What is that?” asked the breach leader. “That can’t be one of us.”

  Girard knelt to open the tank, and tugged on a pair of thick rubber gloves over his thinner ones. “They are vampires. They’re just a very old kind of vampire.”