The reflection infuriated him, reminding him of all he’d lost and would probably never have. And suddenly, David was hauling back, his hand curled into a fist, to drive it into the glass of the mirror. But before his knuckles could connect, his wrist was grabbed in a strong, solid grip.
The punch stopped an inch short, and David glanced to his right as his eyes laced through with lightning. He found himself staring into eyes that were so similar to his in color, most humans automatically assumed they were birth brothers.
Jacob Crow tilted his head toward the mirror. “That’s our last one.” He held David for a few seconds more, the vampire’s power wrapping around his clan brother with a strength he didn’t usually exude. Jake’s eyes searched his. “It’s the new kid, isn’t it?” Jake asked him calmly. “It’s got you thinking… remembering.”
David blinked. He was right.
The discovery of Poe Tessla and his “withering” had David on edge. On the one hand, he felt sorry for the kid; Tessla was going to have to get used to a daily regimen of magic spells and cautionary wards to get through his new existence. He would have to feed… if he didn’t, his mere presence would make those he cared for most – those he desired most – feel sick. Dizzy. Weak. They would end up instinctively pulling away from him, and he in turn would wind up withdrawing from the people who could have helped him the most.
David knew this better than anyone.
To say nothing of having to learn how to deal with the smell and the pain. And then there was the Veil…. Tessla would be able to see past that now. It could be highly unsettling.
But on the other hand, David couldn’t help but wonder how many like him there actually were out there. Was Tessla just the beginning? Were there dozens of Withered? Hundreds? If so – why?
He nodded, just once at Jake’s suggestion. “Yeah, guess so.”
Jake let go of his arm. But a tingling sensation remained, a handprint of the man’s power. Dave glanced down at his arm and his gaze narrowed. He was pretty sure Jake didn’t realize how much vampire magic he was leaking.
Clearly distracted, Jake smiled a tight smile, patted him on the shoulder, and turned away, running a hard hand through his raven-black hair. David watched him go, his expression thoughtful as he scrutinized his best friend and clan brother. There was a definite energy coming off Crow, sharp and jagged. Dave had often felt Jake get angry over the years. Hell, they all lost their cool from time to time.
But this was new. David wasn’t sure he’d ever felt anything quite like it. So he decided to tread carefully.
He moved away from the mirror, watching Jacob closely as the vampire strode to one of the cars in the garage. The building housed three cars at the moment, and seven bikes. Six bikes were out, their Monsters clan riders on jobs. The cars belonged to their leader and two of the clan members. One of the cars was Crow’s, a ’64 Pontiac GTO. It had been his before he’d been… cursed. Now he kept it here and messed with it from time to time, but it was his bike he used for everything else.
The hood of the jet-black Pontiac was propped open. The vampire leaned against the front of his car, peering into the open engine. David knew he wasn’t actually seeing anything inside.
Without turning back to look at David, Jake said over his shoulder, “Look at it this way, Sharpe. At least you know you aren’t alone anymore.”
“No,” agreed David as he slid his hands into his front pockets. “I’ve got the company of a genius teenager and a seriously dodgy warlock.” He stopped and considered that. “Actually, the warlock isn’t even technically marked.” The warlock he was talking about was Darryl Maelstrom, and though he appeared to have risen from the dead and possessed many of the same properties as David Sharpe and Poe Tessla, he bore no scythe birthmark. “So I guess that means it’s just me and the emo.”
Jake didn’t say anything. He’d braced himself on strong arms and gone very still as the air charged up around him. David stopped where he was and studied him. The energy radiating from him was growing stronger. Harder. Sharper. It was almost as if Jake were in pain.
“Something happen at the meeting?” David ventured cautiously.
No answer. But as he continued to watch, Jake’s fingers curled in, bending the metal beneath them as his grip tightened under vampire strength. David raised his chin and took a deep breath. Understanding dawned on him. I think I see.
“So… who is she?”
Jake’s head lifted.
David closed his eyes, nodded to himself, and took a deep breath. Bingo, he thought with a sinking feeling. None of the Monsters had been in love since the clan had been formed. Lust, sure. But this sensation Jake was exuding was just too strong for something so insignificant. And if he was right, it promised trouble. “You met someone at the sovereign meeting, didn’t you?”
Jake pushed off the car and straightened, but he didn’t turn around, and Dave was left staring at his broad back.
Jake said, “We’ll be meeting again tomorrow to form a plan for the job the sovereigns gave us. In the meantime….”
David waited, feeling the air thicken.
“Dave, I need you to do me a solid.”
David hesitated just a second before saying, “Yeah?”
“I need you to find everything you can on one of the wardens in the Vega clan.”
Oh shit, she’s a warden, he thought, as that sinking feeling turned to metal in his gut. Hell and damn. The number of very serious problems that could pose were positively endless. But he wasn’t surprised by Jake’s request. In another lifetime, a man named David Sharpe had been an expert in covert operations. He was the best in the Monsters clan at gathering intel.
“Alright,” he said, though he knew it meant untold amounts of conflict. Anything for a brother. “What’s her name?”
Jake smiled to himself and finally turned around. The fact that David knew it was a woman wasn’t lost on Jake. But he let it go. Instead, he said, “Angela Clemens.”
David digested the name. “Clemens.”
“She goes by Angel among friends.” Jake’s tone was lowering. There was hunger in it now; Dave knew him well enough to recognize that much.
David nodded. “And when you say ‘everything you can,’ you really mean it?” Dave’s look was serious. Every clan member had their talent. No one was as good at this as he was.
Jake’s gaze hardened, becoming shadowed. “I do,” he said, his voice harsh. His inhuman eyes fired up like lanterns. Fangs peeked from behind his lips as he added, “And then some.”
“We gotta get out of this place,
If it's the last thing we ever do.
We gotta get out of this place.
There's a better life for me and you.”
-We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,
The Animals
1965
“There’s battle lines being drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
-For What It’s Worth
Buffalo Springfield
1967
Prologue
1967-1968
Most of the Chippewa had been “relocated” to Canada a hundred and thirty years ago, but my father’s clan remained behind. Minnesota was where we’d made our home.
Things were dangerous for the Crow Clan. My father, White Wolf, was madly in love with a white woman. I can tell you she loved him right back. But when a group of armed men came sniffing around their home in warning, Wolf knew it was because of her love. For her people, it wasn’t allowed.
He told her to leave him. He was afraid she would come to harm. But she wouldn’t leave. She was stubborn as hell. It was one of the things he loved most about her.
So Wolf made a decision to save her life. He made the clan push her away. For him, it was an ultimatum of love, done for her own good.
He didn’t know she was pregnant with me at the time.
My red-haired, green-eyed mother knew though. And for me, she gave in and took us both away. But we did
n’t go far. Just to the city. I was born there.
It turned out the city wasn’t any better for us. The color of my hair, my last name, and it didn’t matter that my mother was white. But for my eyes, I took after my father. And out of love and respect, my mother took my clan’s name. Knowing her, she probably also did this just to piss him off if he ever found out. She was good at that. It was something else he loved about her.
I know because she told me everything about him. Some women might have wanted to forget. Out of anger, maybe. But my mother wanted to remember. And she wanted me to know my father as well as she did.
In any case, people in the city didn’t want to have much to do with me.
That was until I grew up a little, what my dad would have called “growing into my skins.” Then women wanted to have something to do with me. And that just made things worse.
By the time I was in my early thirties, tensions were so high, I knew I was on the verge of either being on the run or in jail for assault or murder. Then came the Selective Service Act of 1967, expanding the ages of eligible males for military service. Seemingly at once, my ticket was drawn, and I was drafted. My people would have told me that was “the crow” at work, with its tricky fate that always stung a little and laughed a lot in the background.
But it was already for shit at home, so when my mother died earlier that same year, I gladly took my place in the ranks of death. I had an edge the other boys didn’t have in boot camp, and later in the field when we were sent to the lines overseas. That edge? I already knew what it felt like to be surrounded by people who wanted to kill me.
But… it was so bad. Things were so wrong there, every single soldier I’d gotten to know in training was gone within the first five weeks. We were falling like bowling pins, and replaced just as quickly.
In that baptism by fire, I had enough chances to prove my mettle to make it to sergeant by the time the ’68 TET celebration started up in Hue, Vietnam. It was an annual feasting time, fireworks, food, whole shebang. The boys and I were ready for a break from the nightmare. For once we didn’t have to drag our tired asses into the city. We were happy. Well, as happy as someone covered in blood and bad memories can be.
Some of the boys wanted food and rest, others wanted dew or skag. Most of us needed both. “Dew” was marijuana, harmless. “Skag” was heroin. I turned a blind eye to all of it; to each his own, especially in Hell.
The gunfire that night began alongside the fireworks, so it took a bit for us to realize what was going down. When we did, we ran for our weapons only to find that our enemy was in every single home around us, and this time dressed in plain clothes. Our black pyjama rule was no good anymore. “Aim for the black pyjamas….” It had been our basic tenet. It was the closest we could come to identifying the Viet Cong.
But this was different. We were taken completely by surprise.
In the chaos, I ran into one of the homes I’d seen a member of my squad enter earlier in search of skag. All I could think about was rounding up as many of my men as possible to formulate an attack. He was the closest.
But I didn’t find what I’d been expecting.
Hind sight is always twenty-twenty. “Scotch,” as we called him, had already been falling way down. Back home his girl had left him, he’d lost his best friend to Viet Cong traps the week before, and I knew there was an emptiness in him now that used to hold hope. That was why he’d sought relief by coming to this house.
But when I found him, he wasn’t getting drugs. In the heat of the attack, something in Scotch cracked wide open. He was out for some kind of mad revenge, and he was taking it out on the daughter of a screaming Vietnamese couple who couldn’t pull him off her.
I rushed into the hut and grabbed Scotch by the back of his uniform, hauling him off the girl with all I had. She screamed like mad and curled up on her side. Scotch fought like a beast in my grip.
Just after I tossed him to the side, in walked the girl’s grandmother.
Over time, you learned to recognize the ones who could curse you. Not everyone believed in that shit, but I did. I’d been raised to. I understood.
She had it in her eyes. She was Ruc. A Vietnamese witch. And I could just feel it too… she was powerful.
I froze, taking in the site of this tiny, skinny woman who had hard, hateful eyes, and my stomach turned to lead. It was rare as hell for a Ruc to leave the solitude of the mountains of Vietnam and join the rest of society. Must have been the TET that drew her down here to be with her family. I would never know.
When she saw me standing over her sobbing, shaking granddaughter – she pinned that mess on me. She whispered a few words, and an evil breeze blew through the hut, touching my skin like snake fingers.
I didn’t have time to think about it. None of us did. What would later be called the TET Offensive was now in full swing. When I would look back on it in the years to come, I would learn the Battle for Hue was one of the bloodiest of the Vietnam war.
Three days later, the medic said I was finished. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t open my damn eyes or really even move in daylight. He said it was some kind of poisoning, probably Agent Orange. Either way, I was useless. So I was sent home.
Right back to a world that hated me even more now than it had before I’d left for the war.
Now… Well, now I’m different. Like every one of my twelve clan brothers. We were pulled into the club over time, given refuge in a leather jacket, and freedom in a V-twin.
A white patch warns the world who and what we are:
Monsters.
Part Two – from the diary of Angela Clemens
No one knows what they want to do when they are fresh out of high school, wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. They have a vague impression of their very near future: Dorm rooms, all-night cramming sessions, rowdy parties, quiet mornings-after in the library, meeting new people, maybe finding a best friend, maybe finding a soul mate.
I didn’t know what I wanted either. I had no idea what to choose. In the end, it didn’t matter. Fate chose for me. And fifteen years after that decision, I found myself kneeling next to one of my trainees to give him instruction.
“Remember what the dossier instructed?” I nodded my head at the sniper rifle the young man in front of me was staring down. He had one eye closed, but when I spoke, he opened it and straightened a little to settle both eyes on me. He was on his belly and elbows, so straightening wasn’t easy. He managed, though.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s a member of a gang in a territory where a number of rogue werewolf victims have turned up cold.”
I nodded. “So what does that mean?”
He thought for a moment, glanced at the gun’s scope, then back at me. “We need more information.”
“Exactly,” I told him. “Just knee-cap him. We don’t want him dead; we need him alive.”
The kid, a twenty-two year old from Indiana, thought fast. “What makes you think I wasn’t going to wound him?” There was no malice in his tone, only sheer curiosity.
I smiled knowingly. I’d learned long, long ago to gauge such things.
“Right,” he said, swallowing hard and blushing a little. “Of course. You can tell.” Then he shrugged, which was also hard to do in his position. “Fine, you got me. I was aiming deadly.”
I gave his shoulder a reassuring pat and straightened, coming to my feet again. “Don’t let it rattle you. That’s why we’re here.”
The area was a marked training facility for the Vega warden clan. It was constructed out of seven underground racquetball courts, strung together with their adjoining walls knocked out. Support beams had replaced them, opening the area up to what felt like a virtual airfield underground.
Right now there were eight new members on that field, five of them running 3D simulations, including Mark. Mark was the sniper in training, and aptly named I might add. The other three were younger and still in basics.
I turned from Mark to a much younger
recruit behind me, around three meters away. She was kneeling in front of a cast iron stove. The stove’s piping ran all the way up to the ceiling and disappeared in shadow. It was functional, but the stove was used for training purposes only.
The girl, an eleven-year-old named Annabelle, was struggling, and I could tell she was becoming impatient. I moved to join her, but was intercepted by Caleb, my training assistant. He simply blocked my path and caught my eye. “Gabriel just point blank asked me via text whether you were still here training. I’m pretty sure he thinks you’ve been here long enough.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him ‘no.’ That you’d left already.” He smiled a wry smile, shrugging.
I was admittedly proud of Caleb. Standing up to Gabriel, much less lying to him, was risky. I felt honored that Cal would do it for me. But I also felt worried. Caleb would catch hellfire if he was caught.
I ran a hand through my hair and nodded. “I’ll finish quickly and head out.” Just in case.
Caleb nodded, no doubt grateful.
I turned and knelt beside Annabelle as Caleb left me to return to supervising other trainees. I glanced at the stove to assess it. Once I had, I turned my attention back to her. She looked up at me with big eyes, waiting.
“It seems to be giving you a hard time,” I said gently.
She looked over at me, then quickly glanced away. Most young recruits behaved this way toward me, a product of my high ranking in the clan. A lot of them had even been treated to stories of my warden exploits.
No doubt Caleb’s doing. The son-of-a-bitch liked to brag way too much.
I glanced over my shoulder at the brown-haired man helping someone with a fighting stance. He looked up as if he felt my attention, and grinned at me. I shook my head and returned my attention to Annabelle.
“You know,” I started conversationally as I sat down cross-legged beside her to put her at ease. “It took me thirty-one tries to light my first fire.”
Annabelle blinked, clearly surprised. She turned wide eyes on me.
Monsters, Book One: The Good, The Bad, The Cursed Page 2