Hunter Hunted (The Eternals Book 2)

by Richard M. Ankers

  “And, that is?” his deep voice enquired.

  “That before the sun dies, and with it this world, she shall be Queen of all, not just the Rhineland, nor Europa, but everything including your homeland.”

  “That is madness!” Grella roared.

  “That is the truth, brother,” Aurora intervened.

  “And you think mother is party to her own downfall. I cannot believe that. I will not believe that.”

  “I do not believe she knows it, but she is,” I replied. “Your mother is being manipulated, although, I can only surmise by whom.”

  “But all we want is to be left alone, to hunt, to know peace.”

  And just like that, another piece of the puzzle slipped into place.

  “What is it, Jean?” Aurora enquired sensing my epiphany.

  “Blood.”

  “Blood,” Grella said. “What has blood to do with anything?”

  “Chantelle needs it, she craves it, they all do.”

  “All Eternals do, there is nothing unusual in that.”

  “There are all kinds of blood, Grella: false, orca, human.”

  “Humans are no more, and orca blood is for the Nordics alone.”

  “Who says?” said I.

  “To which?”

  “To both.”

  “It is a simple fact,” he said crossing strong arms across his broad chest.

  “Well, I'll grant you there aren't many humans, but the monks we spoke of are some. Their father, the oldest of their kind, was the key to the Marquis de Rhineland's production of false plasma, in one form or another, or so I've concluded. He is a friend, a good friend,” I added. “He and his sons have been mistreated to the extent they no longer offer the Marquis and his Hierarchy clientele the resources they have become accustomed to. I could be wrong, but I fancy Chantelle has taken it upon herself to guarantee a new source of said life-giving liquid. She seeks to secure it and her futures.”

  Grella placed his arms behind his back and paced around in the ever-deepening snow. I did not stop him.

  Aurora watched her brother's every step with an intensity that bordered on frightening. She hoped he'd aid us, it was written all over her face, but Grella was ever unpredictable.

  All the talk of blood had made me thirsty, though, so I crouched down to our makeshift sack, took a blood bag for myself and handed one to Aurora. The contents were more slush than liquid, but it satisfied my needs to a degree.

  When I raised my eyes again, I saw Grella had stopped to watch, so I offered him one too. The prince looked at the bag of crimson content with disdain before a taloned finger sliced it open. The face he pulled whilst he partook of the semi-fluid said it all.

  “Not quite orca blood, eh?”

  “Not nearly,” he replied. Grella stooped for a handful of snow and used it to clean his hands and face.

  “I agree,” said Aurora. “Having drunk nothing but orca blood since birth, I believe I would be upset bordering on hysteric if robbed of it.”

  “Or promised it,” I added realising what she planned.

  Grella listened to our dialogue cocking his head to one side in symmetry to his sister. I watched his albino face shift to an ashen grey, and thought he might keel over, so ill did he look. But the seeds of Aurora's words were sown, and he knew we spoke sense.

  “Which way have they gone?” he asked after some deliberation.

  “All roads lead north,” I replied.

  “Are they far ahead?”

  “Far enough,” said Aurora, as a broad smile broke out over her beautiful, pale face. The change suited her.

  “Then, I hope you can run, Jean?” Grella bowed at that, a sweeping thing of ancient elegance, then took off.

  Aurora collected what remained of our sustenance sack from the snow and shot off after her brother, leaving me coughing in a spray of loose flakes.

  However, I still dallied a few moments longer glad of those seconds of calm. It had seemed a lifetime since I'd had a moment to myself. I allowed the falling snow to engulf me and for a certain peace to settle over my world. But time was ever against me. A glance across the canyon confirmed what I already sensed; no one was there. The Nordic princes had departed who knew where, not that I cared. So, I set off in pursuit of my speeding companions and allowed the fierce northerly to purge what troubled thoughts remained.

  * * *

  I had still to reach the others when the howl of a great wolf cut through the dawning day. It stopped me dead in my tracks, the wail of the lupine stoking my inner demon, a sharp pressure, uncomfortable, which left me wondering who still stalked us? I strained my every auditory sense, peered into the snow with narrowed eyes, but the call never sounded again. It left me wondering if I'd imagined it, a ghost of the slaughtered many. But, much as I might've wished it, I hadn't. So, despite the shiver that crept up my spine, I renewed my pursuit of the others a tad more chilled than an Eternal should ever have felt.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  -

  Crimson

  I had thought Aurora to be a miracle of nature in her grace, poise, perfection, but Grella was something else. Containing the Nordic prince was akin to bottling the wind. He was a beast uncaged, a force unparalleled. Grella moved as though unburdened by conditions, racing along within a separate reality, a space in time where he and the elements were one. The snowflakes that bombarded my frame fell by the wayside before he, unable to lay a single, cold touch upon him. I trailed that man in both awe and respect basking in the subtle scent of lavender that emanated from his person. If I'd been Nordic by birth, I should have served him to the end of eternity without question or complaint. But I wasn't Nordic, and I served no man.

  Aurora ran beside Grella an almost exact female representation of her brother. For the first time since meeting her, she exuded pleasure. I could not see her smiling, running in her wake as I was, but I perceived it in my person. She radiated joy, and the world was happier for it. I believed that for the first time in her life, Aurora felt more than just an unwanted mistake. The fact she did, I thought the saddest thing in all creation and that it somehow redressed the cosmic balance.

  * * *

  Seconds became minutes, minutes became hours, and the snow fell inexorably on. The world was silent but for my crunched footfalls; the Nordics made none. I thought once, I should have been happy to run through that limbo forever, but my mind was not what it was. Despite the peaceful calm, the gentle kiss of snowflake on skin, I worried: I worried for the Sunyins, both before and behind, and the cold they must have felt; I worried for their father and whether I should ever see that best of men again, and if I did in what state; but most of all I worried for the girl I loved above all else, the emerald-eyed beauty that was my Linka. I knew I closed the distance between us with each passing moment, but it did little to appease my rocklike heart. I missed her with a passion, a passion I thought would consume me. To have been with her again in blissful touch, I would have done anything to anyone, and that worried me most of all. For her, I should've torn down the sky, ripped up the world and forsaken all else. If it had meant turning my back on those who'd befriended me, I would have. I prayed that choice would not have to be made because it would not have been one.

  * * *

  Drawn from my inner ramblings by the sound of tinkling bells, I realised Aurora laughed again. It was only the second time I had heard her quite so exuberant. Unfortunately, both times had taken me back to Rudolph's palace and the flowers Linka had planted within its grounds. That saddened me further.

  “What's the matter, Jean?” asked Aurora peering over her shoulder, a broad smile splitting the lines of her perfect face. She never even broke stride. “Are you growing tired, can't you keep up?” She laughed again, joy infusing her face with a subtle shade of powder blue.

  “Luckily for you I have a broken leg, or I should be well ahead by now.”

  Grella stopped dead to a tsunami of snowflakes. I almost ran straight into his back. Only a quick swerve,
a loss of balance and a face-first plunge into the snow halted my momentum.

  “My apologies, Jean, I had not realised you were injured. I would have carried you if I'd known. You had but to ask.”

  Grella sounded so formal that his newly stationary sister burst into joyous giggles once more. I took the gloved hand he offered and allowed the prince to help me to my feet.

  “I am quite well, thank you,” I replied.

  “He was joking, brother. Jean is a master in the subtleties of both sarcasm and wit.”

  “Should I have laughed?” Grella asked with a sincerity others would have lacked.

  “No, you shouldn't, my friend. But I can show you something that will bring guaranteed joy to those serene features of yours.”

  “Really, I can't remember the last time I laughed. Do you think I will have forgotten how?”

  “Let's see,” I said, collecting a dollop of snow, forming it into a perfect ball, and tossing it at his sister's head. Unluckily for Aurora, it caught her completely off guard. She turned into the missile as it splattered across her angelic features. The look of shock that shot across her face was matched only by the metamorphosis of her brother's own. Like the granite facade of the mightiest mountain cracking open to the seismic power of an earthquake, his features transformed from dour, to quizzical, to fun. His roar of laughter was akin to the roar of the avalanche that had engulfed me near New Washington. I was equally shocked, too.

  I didn't have time to dwell on the matter as a snowball smacked right into the end of Grella's nose, and then another into my cheek.

  “I've wanted to do that for years.” Aurora grinned at her brother, then turned to me. “It's felt like that with you, too.”

  “Was that another joke?” I replied as Aurora ducked below a snowball larger than her head. “I'm not sure that's quite how it's done, Grella.”

  “You could be right,” he laughed, as he jumped on top of his sister only to be kicked off into the snowdrift he'd created.

  Aurora rounded on her brother sending a torrent of quickly formed snowballs against his back. Grella, for his part, stood motionless before the barrage. I wondered if he'd forgotten you were supposed to duck. It took another blitz to spur Grella into a simple raising of one hand. Aurora stopped that instant.

  I was unsure what occurred between the two and gazed at Aurora with a blank expression. She had returned to her normal taciturn self, as still as that pause before death.

  “What is it?” I asked nobody in particular.

  Grella responded by clawing away some of the heaped snow at his feet, grasping something, then pulling it free of its white covering in one fluid motion. He dropped it again almost as fast.

  Time stood still as the object fell rigid to the ground. With the soundless slump of a fallen moth, the thing settled in the snow. It left me inspecting the frozen corpse of a small, bald, tunic-clad figure: a Sunyin. I could have accepted that except for the crimson puncture wounds to his neck. My mind imbalanced, I screamed.

  “BASTARDS!”

  Grella ignored my outburst. Already the prince searched for more. I joined him in a frenzy of black motion, clawing, kicking, and shovelling snow to one side. However, it was the quietest of the three of us that made a second grisly discovery as Aurora called us men to her.

  “I am sorry, Jean, truly I am.”

  She stood there holding a blue, frozen hand in her own, the hand itself long since detached from the arm it belonged: Chantelle sought to stall us. An exchange of glances was all it took to reinvigorate our searching.

  Despite burrowing through to the parched earth in a radius of fifty feet or more, there was nothing else to be found. Only a frozen pool of crimson blood where Aurora had discovered the missing limb marked the monks' passage. Much to my shame that blood called to me, but I covered it over, buried it one might have said, and stepped away. I could not bury the memory of its owner so easily.

  The passage from mirth to madness had never fallen so rapidly. Even Grella shrank from my rage. He did well to, for in those moments, as I realised the full implications of what we'd found, I descended into a red mist I had hoped to have left in my past.

  “It is never easy to lose those you care for, Jean,” Grella said putting an arm about his silent sister.

  “They did not deserve it.” I shook with uncontrolled rage.

  “The innocent seldom do.”

  “The…the…monks would never hurt anyone,” I stammered.

  “Such is the way of the world. The strong dominate, the weak used as fodder in greater schemes.”

  “I am sick of scheming, Prince Grella. I am sick of innocents being used in these so-called grand designs. I am sick of secrets, lies and deceptions. But most of all, I am sick of myself.”

  “You do not mean that, my friend,” Aurora spoke in hushed tones. “Your heart is good. You do not realise it, Jean, but it is.”

  “You sound like a Sunyin.”

  “If I do it is because we both speak the truth.”

  “The truth!” I spat. “There is only one truth, and that is that all this,” I gestured to the landscape, “all this, will soon be gone. There will be no more world to squabble over; no more power to lust over. All gone!”

  “You are so certain?” Grella asked cocking his head to one side.

  “I know it the truth. When the ruby sun ceases to rise all that I had hoped to see will end: no more animals, no more plants, no more life, just rock, ruin, and whispered memories. The least loss of them all, no more damned Eternals.”

  “If that is true, then why does this Chantelle and her lackeys go to the lengths they do.”

  “I do not know,” I answered honestly.

  “There must be more to it,” he persisted. “There has to be.”

  “If there is, then I am unaware of it, but being that I have been unaware of everything, seemingly, that does not say much.”

  “That is not your fault, Jean,” Aurora tried to reassure me.

  “I can't help thinking it is.”

  “How can it? You are as caught up in these events as myself and my brother now are.”

  “You would not have been if not for me.”

  “It was we that came to you, Jean, not the other way around,” Grella's deep voice corrected.

  “Perhaps, friend? Perhaps, not? But I can't help feeling my inadequacies contributed to it greatly.”

  “Inadequacies! What inadequacies? I have never met someone so resourceful. Who else could've found so many uses for a whalebone?”

  “Was that another joke?”

  “Possibly?” replied Grella scratching his cheek.

  “I'm sorry about that by the way.”

  “Are you?”

  “No, but I thought it polite to say.”

  “You should never apologise for doing right. It was you they wronged, Jean. Mother had no option but to allow you the opportunity for recompense.”

  “I got the feeling it was because of she the twins acted as they did. I believe your mother wanted rid of me, still does. I am a nuisance, a hindrance. Linka alone was meant to be saved. My salvation was your doing.”

  “I do not regret it,” said Grella.

  And I realised in that moment that he meant it. Prince Grella was as much a puppet in the schemes of others as I, if not more so. At least I had a measure of choice in my actions whereas he had none. Grella was bound by a pact older than time. Eternal law, which stretched right back to our vampire ancestry, may have been unwritten, but it was understood by all, and until his mother died, Grella would forever be bound by it. He was too honourable a son, too decent a man for his own good.

  “Do you wish to continue searching for others?” Aurora asked.

  “It would do no good if we found them. As far as I understand it, dead is dead where humans are concerned.”

  “If only it was with us,” Grella replied somewhat cryptically, then turned away to look into the snow-filled north.

  “We should go then,” Auro
ra insisted. “I am as ready as you to deal with this Chantelle.”

  “I'm glad to hear that, dear girl. I will need all the help I can get to deal with her. What say you, Grella?” I enquired, but he had sprinted off some distance away.

  By the time Aurora and I reached his side, he had turned over a body that had lain prostrate in the snow, only visible in part from above. The figure was female and tanned.

  Grella said nothing just cocked his head one way then the other bepuzzled.

  “One of the Hispanics,” Aurora suggested.

  “It appears the Marquis' genetic dabbling has left Raphael's people susceptible to the cold. Let us hope my brother-in-law is also so stricken.”

  “I… I do not understand what has happened here?” Grella sounded bemused to the point of delirium. He pulled the body free of the snow, cradled the once beautiful woman in his arms. His albino hand shook as he examined the teeth that poked from behind blue, once luscious lips. The fangs that sneered back at him provided all the confirmation he needed.

  “The Marquis de Rhineland seeks to make us human. He seeks to make our kind able to withstand the sun,” I said.

  “Why, would he do such a thing?”

  “For the same reasons I wished: an unqualified desire to stand in its light just once before I died.”

  Grella shook his head at that and mumbled.

  “What, what is it, brother?” Aurora asked stepping to his side.

  “I did not believe it. For all my aeons of life, I have thought mother exaggerated about the sun. I thought she tried to scare us into remaining safe, secluded.”

  “On this one, I can assure you, she did not,” I interjected.

  “Do they really not know, Jean?” he asked. “Does the sun truly frighten them so?”

  “More than it is physically possible to believe.”

  “Then, when you stood before it in the Zeppelin, you feared death?”

  “I did, but I would trust Linka with my life.”

  “Then you are a greater man than I imagined,” he said, kneeling before me and inclining his regal head.

  “You should not bow to a foolhardy coward such as I, Prince Grella.”