When he finished, he let the limp, pale corpse drop to the ground, and he stood with his eyes closed, fists clenched and head back, feeling the hot thrill of the lifeblood flowing through him. Even the live feeding from willing humans was nothing compared to drinking his fill and feeling the life flow from his prey. His rational, refined self was ashamed of his behavior, but the fierce predator reveled in the moment. He pulled himself together, rinsed his face with water from the stream and dragged the body into the trees, burying him under a pile of leaves, dry needles and other loose foliage. He shooed the horse and moved on as quickly as he could.
He felt so much stronger for having satisfied the thirst. He hadn’t wanted to drink too much from Sara before he left. He didn’t want to risk weakening her too much, and Aurora would need to feed too. The combined thoughts of feeding and both Sara and Aurora made him stiffen in his current satiated state. He shifted uncomfortably in his saddle and tried to think of something other than the petite, slightly busty girl and the tall, slender beauty he married. Together, they made a scrumptious picture, and he had to dismount and walk for a bit.
Alex traveled on for another week. He guessed that he was about 40 miles Southwest of Albany. His plan was to head to Hartford where a couple of council Vampires had been living before the Solar Storm, and then he could turn east to Boston and try to locate some others he knew of. For a day and a half as he approached Hartford, Alex could swear he smelled the briny odor of sea water over the wind and rain that were almost constant now. He should have been approaching a town called Springfield where he could turn south to Hartford, but as he emerged on a hill top that should have overlooked an inhabited valley, he stared at an ocean surging with breakers lapping at the shoreline. Uprooted trees and floating debris from homes and buildings churned up foam at the waterline. Similar debris was scattered across the ground above the waterline for some distance indicated that the tide or a surge had been a good deal higher at one point.
Alex stared in disbelief. The Atlantic was more than 60 miles further inland than it should have been. Hartford was under the sea, and while he intended to head east to verify, he fully expected that Boston was long gone, as well.
For two days, Alex followed the new coastline roughly Northeast. It became painfully obvious that Boston was a waste of time and was at least 80 miles out to sea in this new geographic arrangement. He turned inland and headed Northwest back towards home. At least it had been his home before the Solar Storm. Cutting across the countryside, he made it home in four days. He fed once along the way when he saw a campfire in the distance and approached to find a single man sleeping beside the low blaze. He silently moved in on foot and examined the contents of the temporary campsite. The man slept with his hand on a crossbow that was loaded with a silver tipped bolt. Alex wondered at the fact that most of the humans he had seen since the Storm were all Vampire haters. Before the Solar Storm, the majority of humans were accepting if not enamored of Vampires. Now everyone he met wanted to kill him. It was another mystery to solve.
He didn’t bother to wake the man before he bit him. He was feeling less guilty and more at peace with his hunter persona after spending a couple of weeks finding out that civilization wasn’t too civilized anymore. Afterward, he stoked the fire and left the body to burn in it.
He went back to the barn where he and the others had spent a couple of days and found that it had been burned to the ground by someone bent on its complete destruction. He chuckled when he found that the stash of food in the cellar was still intact. Whoever had been there hadn’t found it. He was missing Aurora and Sara, and he decided to spend the night in the walnut grove at home.
He tied the horse to one of the posts on the shed and stretched, breathing in deeply the scent of the trees. Everything smelled damp from the rain that came every day, but at least it wasn’t raining at the moment. He noticed a mild odor under the smell of the damp leaves and he went perfectly still, listening. It was a Vampire. There was no mistaking the potent odor a Vampire gave off to another of its kind. He moved silently through the garden and around the corner of the destroyed house, to the half collapsed garage. He saw a shadow near the Rover. As he moved closer, careful to stay out of sight, he heard a voice call out.
“I can smell you, of course,” a low gravelly voice came from the interior of the garage wreckage.
“I can smell you too. This is my home. Explain yourself,” Alex demanded, falling easily back into the formal rhythm of an elder Vampire of the council speaking to an underling.
“I apologize, m’lord. I smelled that this was a Vampire home as soon as I arrived, but the scents were all old, sir. It seemed as if nobody had been here for the last two or three weeks. I was just looking for a place to rest a bit.” A Vampire that must have been older when he was turned came out of the garage. He was smallish for a Vampire and looked to be at least 60 in human years. Alex could tell from his scent that he was several hundred years Alex’s junior, no more than three or four hundred years old. “I’m Reginald, sir. I meant no offence, being here. I’m heading to Syracuse in the morning, but I can start out tonight if I’m trespassing, sir.”
“Syracuse? That’s at least five days from here on horseback,” Alex calculated.
“I haven’t got a horse, so I guess it’ll take me a bit longer,” Reginald said entirely without humor.
“What’s in Syracuse?” Alex asked.
“I am trying to find the elders,” Reginald said. “I heard there is a council elder in Syracuse and that a village has been formed.”
“What do you mean a village has formed and which Vampire elder is in Syracuse?” Ryan was growing agitated by his own ignorance of events.
“Sir, I’m afraid I am not an important man, and I wouldn’t know which elder has decided to set up in Syracuse, but I have heard that several villages have been established already for the protection of Vampires and humans from the Hunters that have taken over the highways.” His low, rough voice rumbled on as he nervously shifted from foot to foot. He was well aware that Alex was an old Vampire, and he bravely asked, “begging your pardon, sir if it’s none of my business, but it seems to me, you must be an elder even if you don’t sit on the council. I don’t know if I ever met a Vampire that feels as old as you.” He tried to make that last comment sound respectful, but he was a little in awe of Alex.
“As it happens, Reginald, I am an elder and a council member, and I think you and I need to have a seat and talk before we leave for Syracuse in the morning. I expect a full report.” Alex’s authority was unquestionable.
Reginald and Alex sat by the shed in the walnut grove with their backs against the posts. “I want your whole story from the beginning,” Alex informed the Vampire that looked like a well preserved old man. Even old men made good looking Vampires.
“Well, sir, It started in NYC for me. I never knew what hit me, but suddenly I was being swept along in the ocean. I just had to grab a hold of a chunk of something floating and hang on. I got dragged under a lot, but being a Vampire, I didn’t need to breathe, so I just waited to come up again and grabbed the next thing that floated by.” Reginald shook his head and continued. “There were bodies everywhere, and sir, some of them were Vampires. I saw they were crushed or otherwise severely injured. I thought they would start healing, but they didn’t. They were dead, and I mean final dead.” Reginald paused, and it was all Alex could do to keep from shouting questions at him, but he didn’t want to reveal the extent of his ignorance.
Reginald picked back up with, “Someone later told me that the ocean water was a Tsunami. Anyway, I never got crushed, myself, and I eventually got tossed on land somewhere in Massachusetts, I think. There were lots of people that made it out, but a lot more that didn’t. I don’t know how the human ones survived, but some of them did. We all stayed together in a camp of sorts, but people started getting sick. I don’t know what kind of sickness it was exactly, but the humans started dying of disease. Bad water, I heard someone say
, but I’m no doctor. I moved inland with another two Vampires that came out of the water. We were still pretty excited about day-walking. We knew we could because we were in the water for days with no way to hide from the sun and we never burned up. So, we were pretty thrilled, and we were travelling in the day and sleeping at night. On the third day, three guys on horses rode up, and one guy tried to shoot me. It was really weird, but the bullet kind of fizzled or something; it fired, but nothing like it was supposed to. It hit me so slow that it didn’t break the skin, but it sure hurt a lot, like getting hit with a rock from a slingshot. On top of that, the bullet was silver, and I got the idea we were in big trouble because I always thought that Vampires who talked about silver to humans had their tongues removed and when they grew back, removed again.”
That last part amused Alex despite his grim mood because he and the council had started a rumor of that particular punishment about two hundred years ago when humans and Vampires were starting to cohabit.
“So me and the other Vamps jumped into action against the guys.” He looked embarrassed. “It should’ve been a slaughter, but a big guy appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my buddies by the back of their necks as they were going after the ones on the horses. He had claws, and he was strong. He was tearing out their spines, and they didn’t seem strong enough to get away. The other three guys jumped me and started stabbing me with silver knives. Damn, that hurt. Took way too long to heal too. Anyway, I saw the big guy drop the other two, dead on the ground, and I threw the human guys off of me and ran like the wind.” Reginald looked as if he thought Alex was going to berate him. “I know I should’ve been able to take on a Were, but I was feeling weak ever since I got out of the water and after what he did to those other Vampires, I didn’t know if I could take him. I’m sorry, sir.”
Alex thought about his own encounter with the Were-tiger, and he knew Reginald would be dead if he had tried to face him. “What do you know about that Were?” Alex asked, ignoring Reginald’s apology and embarrassment. Reginald seemed relieved to continue.
“The Were never changed, and I only saw claws, but he kind of smelled like a cat after he shifted those claws out. Before they shift, I can never tell that they’re Weres at all,” Reginald said shaking his head.
Alex remembered the day he had discovered Ryan was a Were. He saw Ryan shift his eyes in the dark, revealing the telltale glow. That had been two years ago in the garden, and he had been standing not far from where he was this very moment. Before Ryan made the mistake of shifting his eyes in view of Alex, Alex never actually noticed Ryan at all, much less suspected him of being a Were.
Reginald told him about running until he was clear of the Hunters and the Were. “I didn’t find out until later that these guys were everywhere, and they were being armed, organized and trained by mercenaries. Before that, they were redneck nobodies showing up at those anti-Vampire meetings and throwing eggs at Vamp houses. Now they call themselves the Hunters and Were cat mercs are helping them.”
Alex knew that some of those humans had been a little more serious about terrorism than just going to meetings, but they had never been well organized. Mercenaries explained the Were cats, but that didn’t explain how they ended up helping the haters, now the Hunters, or who was paying them to do it. “When did you find all this out?” Alex asked.
“I stayed hidden for a while after that, but one day I could hear someone following me. I got really nervous about it being another Were, and I tried to wait real quiet behind a tree to jump him. It was a Were alright. He wasn’t fooled by my hiding place, and he grabbed me and threw me down showing me some crazy big teeth. But then he stops and shifts back and says he didn’t realize I was a Vampire, and he let me go. Of course, he didn’t actually apologize, not that I ever thought I would hear anything even that close to an apology from a Were.” Reginald noticed that Alex appeared to be getting impatient with his side notes, and he got back on track. “So, I didn’t know what to think, and the Were started asking me about who I’d seen and what kind of weapons they had and so on. I told him about the guys, and even though it made me a little nervous, I told him about the Were and that I was hiding behind the tree because I thought it might be him coming. He just got upset and asked me if I thought he looked like a cat? Apparently he was Wolf clan, and they are touchy about these things.”
Alex thought about Ryan and his connections. Ryan’s special forces, he thought. “What did the wolf tell you?” Ryan prodded.
“He told me that Vampires and the humans who don’t support the Hunters are setting up the villages for protection in numbers. The Hunters are taking over the highways, and that Were cat mercs are involved somehow. He told me to stay low and try to make it to Syracuse. He said there was a Vampire elder there running things.” Reginald looked at Alex as if he was waiting for a verdict.
Alex pronounced his decision. “Tomorrow we head to Syracuse. You will ride with me until we can find another horse.”
Reginald looked relieved to have someone else in charge.
“What do you know about the power or radios, or anything about this weather?” Alex was going through his list of questions in his mind.
“Not a thing,” Reginald replied. “I’m no scientist.”
Twenty-two
On the second night after leaving the walnut grove, Alex and Reginald, came across three Hunters camped out with no signs of a Were, but Alex knew that they might not be able to tell if the Were was in full human form.
Two of the men were sleeping, and one was on watch. He sat with a crossbow next to him and a silver knife in his hand. He was using his free hand to poke at their fire with a stick. Stupidly, ruining his already pitiful night vision, Alex thought. He was surprised at how easily he was slipping back into the silent hunter mode that he had walked away from over 200 years ago.
He slipped into the camp behind the watcher and closed his fist around the man’s throat, his clawed fingers sinking into the soft flesh and squeezing the esophagus and trachea fully closed. The man’s eyes were bulging from his head, but he was unable to make a sound and his life blood was flowing out of his throat around Alex’s buried fingers. Alex didn’t wait to find out if the man would shift into a Were cat and he tore out the flesh and sinew he was gripping, ending the man quickly, without waking the others.
He moved to the closest sleeper and again, trying to be silent, he grabbed the hair and skull of the man and twisted sharply to snap his neck. The man squeaked just before the crack of his spine sounded and the second sleeper came awake in a shot. He jumped up, wielding a silver dagger, holding it out in front of him as he backed toward the trio of horses that were tethered on the other side of the campfire. Alex closed the distance and was in front of him in a flash. The man was quick and lunged out with the dagger. Alex had to sidestep and lean back to miss the point, and before he recovered to end the confrontation, Reginald was behind the man. The gray haired Vampire grabbed the man’s knife arm, snapping the bone audibly. The knife dropped to the ground, and the man screamed in pain. Reginald cut the scream off abruptly, tearing into the flesh of his neck with his Vampire teeth. Alex watched the smaller Vampire tearing and feeding on the Hunter as if he was starved.
Alex belatedly realized that Reginald probably had been starving. He did not mention feeding at any point during the last week or more that he had spent travelling on foot. But, he never complained or suggested feeding to Alex at any time during the last couple of days, and Alex realized that Reginald was probably still operating under the restrictions of hunting humans that the council had placed on all Vampires. Alex’s mere presence had probably discouraged Reginald from trying to feed.
When Reginald next looked at Alex, Alex could see the guilt and a little fear in his eyes. He put a hand on the Vampire’s shoulder and said, “I’m not rescinding any laws just yet, but I think that we need to consider that we are at war here and unusual circumstances exist.”
Reginald looked a little relieved, but only
nodded.
“Reginald,” Alex fixed his gaze meaningfully. “We will not be speaking of these things to anyone, including other Vampires until I’ve had a chance to meet with the elders.”
“Of course not, sir,” Reginald agreed solemnly.
Alex saddled one horse and freed the others while Reginald buried the three men in a shallow grave. Alex knew it wasn’t much to conceal their movements, but he didn’t think it was wise to leave the bodies to declare the presence of Vampires willing to kill humans.
He did not have a problem slaughtering the enemies of the Vampires, but he and the other elders had spent the last two centuries seducing most of the human population into happily becoming the Vampire’s willing food source. Humans were convinced of their safety in this and the violent deaths of any people including Hunters might bring about a distrust that had to be avoided.
Alex watched Reginald filling in the last of the dirt and brushing leaves and other debris over the grave to conceal it from the casual eye. He hoped he would be able to trust the other Vampire with his secrets. He had no intention of sharing more than necessary, but he decided to find out as much about Reginald as possible.
Now that they were both well fed, they had the energy to travel day and night, stopping for a while now and then to rest the horses and stretch their own muscles. During one such rest, Alex asked Reginald about his past. It started out as a harmless question about his creator, then Alex skillfully drew out the entire tale.
Cherishing Destiny (A Dangerous Destiny) Page 12