Trace’s account of the skirmish within the church differed greatly from Markus’s, and while Isaac would never doubt his faithful officer, the debriefing of a newly recruited female werewolf substantiated Trace’s version of events: Cain had already been killed before the battle reached the church; Markus had stabbed Trace while the werewolf endeavored to eliminate the female hybrid commander allowing Markus to steal the glory.
The vampire Elder wasn’t a hero, the conqueror of the hybrid clan. He was a treacherous, lying, manipulative fool and would always be so.
Isaac glanced at Trace and the lycanthrope officer nodded. Inhaling a deep sigh Isaac gazed around the Great Hall. The lights were dimmed, torches protruding from holders in the walls providing the majority of light in addition to candles burning on the tables. The hall was bedecked with embroidered silk banners, and intricately crafted tapestries decorated the walls instead of wallpaper. Hand-painted frescoes coated the areas of stonework not concealed by the drapery, and four sixteenth century crystal chandeliers hung from the room’s sculptured ceiling.
The scent of cooked food mingled with the tang of alcohol and the sweet aroma of blood as a substitute for wine, the concoction hanging in the room’s heavy air to stimulate the senses with each breath.
The vampires present in the room tried to maintain an air of dignity and importance in the presence of their more raucous cousins, the bloodsucker’s silk clothing decorated with gold stitching. Even the podium sustained a degree of regal sophistication, having been built with wood harvested from Balkan forests and vampire effigies had been carved into the timber prior to construction. Everything needed to be pristine and elegant in an attempt at portraying themselves to be a more significant species than their lycanthropic brethren.
The coven needed to learn that they were governed by nothing more than a treacherous individual whose standing within the supernatural world was in fact lower than that of a werewolf peasant.
No one stood on the podium ready to offer praise to the vampire Elder.
Isaac decided it was his turn.
* * *
A torrent of nervous tension surged through Markus’s emotions as Isaac rose from his seat and stepped to the podium.
What the hell does that infuriating animal want now?
The Alpha-Male didn’t look in his direction and therefore failed to notice the glare of revulsion emanating from the Elder. Markus didn’t like this situation; never before had a werewolf spoken out in the Great Hall, or in the company of Markus for that matter, and such an occurrence now did not bode well—especially with Isaac being the one to deliver the speech. Reaching for a glass of water Markus attempted to dampen the aridity that had surfaced in his throat. The liquid failed to refresh him, did nothing to wash away his mounting anger or quench his anxiety.
The rumble of commotion diminished in the hall as Isaac climbed the podium and extended his arms asking for quiet. To Markus’s left, Ilanna adjusted her position upon her throne, settling into a more comfortable pose to await the lycanthrope’s speech. Markus’s apprehension climbed another notch and collided with loathing.
Isaac’s voice echoed off the ancient ceiling. “I would like to begin by offering my gratitude to the coven for being the most gracious of hosts this evening. It is a pleasure to be here and we would like to say thank you for your hospitality.”
Gentle applause rippled throughout the gathering. Markus kept his hands on the table, palms flat to the silk tablecloth.
Isaac looked towards his table, the werewolf’s gaze focusing on Markus’s wife. “Ilanna; you look beautiful tonight—the world’s best hostess, of that I have no doubts.”
Ilanna nodded her thanks, a smile pulling at her cheeks. Fury boiled Markus’s guts, his right hand clenching into a fist. He ground his teeth, not surprised when Isaac turned to face the crowd without offering thanks to him.
Incompetent fool! I long for the day—not too far from now—when this insignificant werewolf will lie dying on the end of my sword!
“I have heard many great tributes about Markus tonight, most of which have touched my emotions in ways that none of you could possibly imagine. And yet there are still things about this great man, this acclaimed vampire, this leader of the coven, which many of you do not know about.” The Alpha-Male paused for a moment, the room around him silent and attentive, and then he nodded towards a table near the far end of the room. “Max; if you’d be so kind.”
Anger diluted in Markus’s stomach, overtaken by a fast developing storm of nervous tension. A gaunt lycanthrope stood from its place at the table, walked to the doorway, and pulled a rope hanging in the shadows. With a flutter like the sound of beating wings a giant white sheet unfolded in front of the hall’s main entrance. A murmur of inquisition rumbled in the room, heads turning as the guests questioned each other as to what was happening.
Unease grew sharper in Markus’s abdomen. He pushed back in his throne, the chair legs scraping on the concrete floor. Ilanna reached out and placed her cold hand over his.
The skinny werewolf shuffled to a spot beneath the podium, and the hum of mechanical fans accompanied a beam of light splitting the gloom to focus a bright square onto the hanging fabric.
Isaac spoke, his voice loud and clear. “During the last few decades, aided by the rapid advance of modern technology, we’ve been able to develop a program of intense interrogation that has garnered numerous successes for the pack.”
Most probably against the coven, Markus thought, fighting hard to control his contorting emotions. He sensed movement behind him and glanced over his shoulder. Two lycanthropes positioned themselves behind the table, ten feet from his throne. Markus looked towards Ilanna, certain his wife had not seen this development. His fear escalated to the point he could almost smell it.
Ilanna leaned towards him and whispered: “Do you know what’s going on, my love?”
He forced a smile. “No, my dear, I’m afraid I don’t.”
Whatever it is, it’s not good.
A still image flashed onto the screen and a gasp echoed off the hall’s vaulted ceiling.
The picture displayed a hybrid strapped to a chair, its skull chiseled away, blood-matted brain exposed, wires crossing its head and fused with tissue.
“We have developed a technique whereby we can decipher the electrical impulses of brain waves and transform them into visual images and coherent speech. We can tap into the minds of individuals and learn everything about their past simply by studying their memories: memories stored in their subconscious; memories that can reveal even the most dark and sinister secrets.”
Oh my god!
Markus pulled his hand from Ilanna’s grasp and staggered from his seat.
“What is it?” his wife asked.
Terror crawled up his throat and locked the words in his larynx. If it were possible for him to pale further, Markus was certain he just had.
Another image flashed onto the screen: an attractive woman whose body appeared to have been ripped to shreds, her head excavated in order to have electrodes attached to her brain.
“This is the former wife of Simon Cain, the picture taken three years ago during the final moments of her life. Her memories revealed a lot.”
Ilanna’s attention pulled back to the screen, to the macabre picture displayed on the clean white surface. Markus couldn’t force his gaze from the image either, but backed away, his progress halted by the two lycanthropes that stepped onto the platform and locked their hands around his arms.
“These, ladies and gentlemen,” Isaac said, his voice rising with a hint of triumph, “are her memories.”
The image disappeared, and for a moment there was nothing. Moving pictures stuttered onto the blanket—a video recording of memories belonging to someone Markus used to know: the damp stonework of a small room surrounded a child; a stick dragging across the rough, rounded walls; a nursery rhyme sung from the mouth of a small girl; a man entering, dressed in black, the face all too famili
ar . . . Markus’s features had not changed in the last eight hundred and eighty-two years.
For a horrifying moment the images on the blank sheet held him paralyzed in fear. Markus stared at his own history: a period three hundred and eighty years in the past that he’d buried deep into his subconscious; an era he hoped would have remained hidden, never discovered.
The memories of his hybrid daughter—born to him, a vampire Elder, and to an incarcerated werewolf, the female lycanthrope murdered hours after giving birth—cycled on the screen and plagued him with tormenting reality.
Realization in the room was almost palpable; awareness dawning on the congregation that Markus had committed a heinous crime against them all.
The Great Hall stretched before him, the podium in its center upon which Isaac reveled in delivering this shattering news. Eighteenth century trestle tables spanned the antechamber’s perimeter, vampires and werewolves alike stunned into shocked silence by the imagery displayed in fifteen-foot square color before them. The sheet upon which the images of Markus’s hybrid daughter’s memories were projected hung down over the far entrance, the vaulted hardwood doors only partially visible beneath the draping blanket.
If he attempted an escape in that direction the gathered horde would be upon him before he could cross half the distance to the room’s main exit.
At his back, perhaps fifteen feet away, was a smaller exit; a door usually kept locked, utilized only by the head dignitary who presided over functions such as weddings and birthday festivities that were sometimes held here. Markus had used that passageway many times; knew it carved a route around the edge of the building’s main inner courtyard and eventually opened into the imperial library.
The images on the screen had changed from the prison cell where he had once kept his hybrid daughter, and now showed a forest cloaked in rainfall as his child stared through the darkness to his castle in Romania on the night he’d freed the girl instead of taking her life.
Isaac stood proudly upon the podium, his stare fixed on Markus’s fear-etched countenance. In the edge of his periphery vision Markus noticed Ilanna turn her head, slowly, as if distress had tightened her muscles. He couldn’t look at her, had no desire to see the hurt and sense of betrayal almost certainly carved onto her beautiful features.
Vampires seated at the tables within the Great Hall turned to face him with eyes clouded by disappointment and a sense of bewildering disbelief: his soldiers, his Eliminators, warriors whom he’d fought alongside, staring at him as if he had now become the enemy. Blood-lust blazed brightest in the gaze of lycanthropes, the werewolves struggling to control a transformation fueled by hatred.
Four hundred years ago when the bloodlines of vampires and werewolves were crossed, the perpetrators were rounded up, beheaded, their corpses burned. Markus himself had presided over the execution of no less than forty of his own kinsmen, all the time ignoring the possibility that such a fate would befall him. He was a supreme commander, above the law, untouchable by the pack or even the coven that surrounded him.
Just an illusion now, it seemed.
He had to get out of the building or face the prospect of his own execution.
He had no other option.
The werewolves restraining him appeared engrossed in the film show in the Great Hall. With rapid fluidity Markus wrenched his arms from their slackened grip. He turned to his left and slammed the heel of his right hand into the lycanthrope’s nose, driving the nasal bone into the creature’s brain. It collapsed in a heap. Nimble and agile, Markus leaned forward and delivered a back kick into the second werewolf’s throat. Larynx and trachea crunched with the impact.
Before the werewolf crumpled to the ground Markus sprinted for the door behind him.
“Get him!”
The voice screamed at his back as he hurried to the small exit. He had expected Isaac to give the order; for the sanctimonious lycanthrope to stand upon the pedestal and direct the gathered crowd to hunt Markus down. The order had not come from the Alpha-Male—the voice had come from a female.
Ilanna?
Had she given the command?
Markus’s fingers gripped the key and turned. He hauled open the door, had no time to close it and lock out his pursuers. Footsteps pounded across the regal carpet adorning the floor of the Great Hall, vampires and werewolves giving chase under the directive of his own wife! Dragging the door shut behind him as best he could, if only to give himself a few seconds head start, Markus sprinted down the narrow white-washed corridor.
The callous irony of his precarious situation was not lost on him: he was in Santi Quattro Coronati—his fortress, the heart of his empire—and yet he was running for his life.
* * *
Anton left the Great Hall via the south entrance, hurried down a short hallway, and then sprinted through the majestic library. A group of Eliminators ran in his wake, chasing lycanthropes mingled with the horde.
His mind spun with questions formulated from the shocking images he’d just witnessed on the giant screen. Such an occurrence seemed almost unimaginable. Markus, his revered leader, the coven’s greatest Elder, was nothing more than a double-crossing heathen whose fate should have been decided along with those other traitors four hundred years ago when the bloodlines were foolishly crossed. He’d kept his secret hidden well; had often talked with intense hate and disparagement of the hybrid species, had repeatedly called for the crossbreed’s total annihilation from the supernatural order, and yet he’d had a hand in the creation of that foul breed.
Anton loved Markus, respected the Elder more than he had his own father. He would have gladly given his life for whatever cause Markus believed in. Betrayal burned in his stomach with an intense pain—he had no idea how Ilanna was feeling.
Halfway through the library he unsheathed his sword but prayed to the memory of Markus’s venerated grandfather that today he wouldn’t be forced to use it.
It seemed like only yesterday when Anton had sat at a desk in this very room and gazed at the horrific images of Gabriella, Markus’s vampire daughter, and thought he understood the true sense of hatred every vampire felt for the hybrids. They had slaughtered the Elder’s child: the vampire Anton loved dearly. Maybe her killer had been Markus’s descendant, a loathsome creature that carried the blood of a vampire Elder.
The shame of his leader’s horrific disloyalty to the coven twisted Anton’s guts and made him sprint harder.
Why, Markus?
Anton dismissed his own question; he was taking orders from Ilanna now.
He headed for the far corner of the library, to a locked door concealed behind the superbly crafted statue of Gabriel, Markus’s grandfather. Stopping at the door, with the angry mob following, Anton turned the key, flung open the entrance and stepped into the doorway.
Eight concrete steps led down into the submerged passageway, dim overhead lighting reflecting off the white-washed walls. The secret corridor should have remained undisclosed from even those within the coven, but this horrible turn of events had now exposed the entrance to the supernatural world’s most private burial chamber.
Anton paused on the top step, his breath controlled and unhurried, sword gripped tight in his right hand. At the foot of the stone staircase Markus skidded to a halt. The Elder’s alabaster complexion seemed to have paled further, fear and panic widening his eyes into orbs filled with darkened pupils.
Fangs jutted from Markus’s gums and distorted his speech. “Step aside, Anton. I order you to let me through!”
Anton said nothing. He couldn’t find contempt for his commander, that sensation of hatred temporarily submerged by this meeting with the great Elder. He held no emotion other than a calm desire to serve the coven.
“You will let me pass!”
Anton remained silent.
Behind him the library filled with the chasing mob. They pushed at Anton’s back, almost forcing him to step into the passage but he locked his legs and stood firm.
Markus’
s eyes widened as he saw the horde beyond the Eliminator, shouting for his head. A panicked gasp left the Elder and he spun on his heels. The sounds of a pursuing mass echoed down the cramped corridor to meet him, Markus unable to retreat the way he’d come.
For one brief moment a twinge of pity knotted Anton’s intestines but he pushed the unhelpful emotion aside. Markus had betrayed him, the coven, Gabriella’s memory, and the supernatural world. Ilanna had given the order and Anton would ensure he followed it.
With alarm stuttering his movements, Markus reached for a concealed doorway buried into the citadel’s stone foundations and pushed it open.
Without a word he disappeared into the tunnels of the fortress’s subterranean catacombs.
* * *
The cramping sickness of adultery contorted Ilanna’s guts as she sprinted after her fleeing husband. Stunned astonishment had seated her in the throne for a moment as the distressing scene played upon the large screen before the huge gathering. The shock had been so deep that even Markus’s scuffle with the guards deployed to arrest him had escaped her attention at first.
Her distress had now abated, and she ran faster than everyone around her. Centuries of honed agility pushed her through the pursuing horde, the anger and hurt of his infidelity spurring her on.
It seemed too surreal to be happening. Markus cheated on me with a werewolf—and fathered a hybrid!
She forced her way to the front of the screaming mob and sprinted harder through the cramped passage.
Give or take a decade, the crossing of the bloodlines had occurred four hundred years ago: a time when Markus and she had been married for seven decades. She knew that on occasions, with previous Elders, adultery was tolerated as a way of increasing the coven birthrate, but such practices were long since outdated. Ilanna and Markus had agreed on banishing such an activity from their marriage, and from their time as rulers. The fact her husband had forsaken that vow sliced Ilanna open with as much callousness and pain as her own blade had done to others countless times in battle; the fact he had cheated on her with a werewolf, their feared enemy, was almost incomprehensible.
The Last Stand -- Blood War Trilogy Book III Page 14