by JN Moon
Dark Nephilim
Always Dark Angel Series
Book Two
Edition 1 2017
Copyright © 2017 JN Moon
GrippingReadsLtd Production Ltd
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my friends who have stuck by me and supported me during the highs and lows of writing this. And the family I live with who have barely seen me for months as I disappear into the writing cave when I’m not out in the world for the day job. I hope one day soon to have a holiday...
Licence Notes.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
Publisher’s Note.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are either fictitious or the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Dark Nephilim
Acknowledgements
Contents
Prologue
The Crypt.
Marcus
Where Angels Tread
Your Cold Vampire Heart
Firedrake
Burning
Void
Damien
The Taste of Blood
The Demon
Killing Demons
Fallen Angels
Lucius’ Story
Reflective World
Rachel Disappears
Vengeance
Through Anthony’s Eyes
Dark Mirrors
Waxing Shadows
21st Century Vampire
The Children
Secrets
Death of the Fallen
Gathering of the Damned
Book 3: Children of the Fallen Taster
About
Author Notes
How Can You Help?
Prologue
They crouched on top of the Georgian buildings, their massive wings beating slowly. Looking down as the mortals passed unawares, these magnificent and terrifying creatures were watching, waiting. Waiting for blood; their once milky skin, now shining obsidian, crimson tinged. Red from the blood they stole, blood that they were not designed to take. Crimson that glistened under the slight moonlight in that picturesque city. Like something from a macabre Gothic tale, hair flowing in the wind and their hands gripping the ledges, their movements animalistic. But then they’d never been human.
Watching them from my hiding place, they jumped down one by one and blended effortlessly into society. Their wings remained hidden from mortal eyes by some trick, but I didn’t know how. I stayed hidden otherwise they’d take my blood for sure. They’d smell it and they would bleed me dry. But not all my kin were so fortunate to escape their grasp.
These creatures were muscular, unnaturally tall with the confidence of a hundred kings. Each of them were forbidden by nature and answerable to no-one. They searched for my kind who they’d spent thousands of years killing remorselessly as they viewed us as an abomination, a plague upon the land. And now they sought us to devour our blood, our souls. It had driven them into a frenzy, the taste of blood, that swoon, hungry and savage.
These creatures changed the design of their nature from killing my kin, to feeding off of us. We, the hunters, became the hunted, and we had to hide and out-manoeuvre these dark nephilim that were once divine power, now evil.
My heart pounded at high speed and I tensed as I watched them. I wished I had my friends with me. But I was alone.
Death would fill the streets tonight. Vampire blood would be spilled as the gates of Hell had been opened. All the damned were crawling through, feasting on the souls of men and vampires and destroying their hearts.
I wanted time to heal after that genocide, after fighting in the conflict. For a while, at least I gained some kind of peace...I’d forgotten I was sleeping whilst I was dreaming; surreal images and feelings flooded my mind. But now I realised that in the realm of the supernatural, nothing rests for long...
The Crypt.
Anthony
I gasped in shock, the cold air jolting me into consciousness.
Open your eyes. Open them! But I could not. It took several pain-staking minutes, and then even longer for my vision to adjust.
As my eyes strained in that dark place, I found myself lying on an earthen floor in a dusty, mildewed crypt. I shuddered as cold from the frozen floor penetrated through my clothes into my body. My stiff frame was reluctant to move so I started by moving my hands and feet. Pain seized my body.
Short and rasping breaths, my lungs were chilled. I thought my body was stronger than this, but as my memory returned I realised I had gone to ground during autumn and it now felt like deep winter.
Ice encrusted the ivy growing over the sarcophagus in the crypt and a trickle of fear crept inside my stomach as my mind made sense of the situation that I had fled from. And now my mind pulled together the past events that had led me to hiding out here in the first place.
I remembered my not too distant past when I had been happy, mortal, and living an ordinary life. I’d had a job that I liked, and a girlfriend who loved me, introverted and introspective as I was. I glanced over to her. She looked so peaceful sleeping at my side that you could be forgiven for thinking she was dead. I’d had all the normal trappings of human existence and had been ignorantly happy.
My body jolted involuntary as the memory of the night that changed my life flooded back.
The thugs, the vampires that drained me to near death, then forced me to drink their fetid blood. They were not dashing and bold, they were vile, demonic, and without language. Their stench alone was repulsive. But my instinct, my will to survive kicked in, and I had gulped their blood fast. Things went to Hell in a matter of months.
As I lay there thinking, body rigid from the cold in that grey crumbling grave, slowly able to digest the changes that had been thrust at me. I had killed innocent humans in the beginning. My body thrust the mercy of the lashing torrent of blood lust. My soul severed from my consciousness.
Before being vampire, I wouldn’t harm a thing. And the memory of that innocent woman still haunted me. Little had I known at the beginning that killing innocents was forbidden. Little had I realized that my past evils would torment me forever.
Then I’d joined with other vampires succumbing to debauchery, preying on criminals...I was an unstoppable force. The hunger drove me with an urgency that I was incapable of controlling. Then I was dragged into the crazy ideology of a despot Elite vampire war. Their mission to rid the world of the lower orders of vampires, creating an army of vampires genetically enhanced with the Elite genes to rule and govern the underworld.
I had found myself locked up, chained up, and bled and beaten before being altered further by my vampire friend. I was lucky to escape with my life.
As these memories streamed into my mind, my body tensed and breathing quickened. I took a slow, deep breath. I was glad to have time to realise how much I’d survived and how much I’d changed.
But what am I now? A killer. A drinker of human blood. I drank the blood of a demi-god, by her choosing, to save my life. I had been infected by a creature made by the Elite. An experimental. Neither vampire nor human
, he’d undergone the gene therapy to turn it into an Elite soldier. It didn’t work on everyone, and those whose physiology rejected the genes were mutated into something hideous into a state of limbo, unable to take blood or food. The demi-god, Emidius, saved me with her blood after I was bitten trying to kill the crazed beasts. She told me that she saw potential in me.
What that is I have no idea, unless it is my charming personality and my extensive DVD collection. She who everyone feared, what was she really? I have no idea.
My name is Anthony and I have been a vampire for a few years and now I want nothing more than to live as I did before I was a vampire. I cannot, I know. But I want to return to life and blend effortlessly into the background. I want to live with Rachel, my lover who was turned by my vampire friend. Selfish, yes. But she came willingly, her choice made mostly by the danger of the growing amount of vampires prowling in the city.
So after all that, I went to ground with her. I had no clue actually that I could do this, it was instinct. And fear. Even though I knew I had more power than most thanks to Emidius for sharing her blood. I had wanted to get away from the fall out of the Elite’s failed eugenics programme and war.
And Rachel. She thought she had killed her maker and my friend, Nathaniel. But he was old and strong and I knew he still lived. Though God knows how as he was doused in petrol and set on-fire after she drove a fire poker into him.
Closing my eyes for a second, I rested whilst images of that night flooded my mind with a million other thoughts. My thoughts chattered at me like birds greeting the dawn. My body started to revive and I could feel my limbs willing to be moved. Slight warmth moved gently through my body and breathing was less laboured.
Hiding in crypts in 2017. I spat a laugh at the irony of it. Who knew! And I was dressed in black. I must have been born to it!
My eyes opened slightly wider now and I looked again over at my lover. She was like an effigy, pale and cold to touch. Like death. Fitting for this timeworn place. Inside the crypt lay a few crumbling sarcophagi and frosty creepers twisted around them mixed with moss. Like something from a macabre tale.
Slowly, I sat up and felt my back ease as I moved it. I was rigid from lying still for so long and the freezing cold. Looking at my hands, they shimmered as frost had covered them and my body. On Rachel it gave the illusion of an ice queen. Gradually I stood up, blood rushing through my legs, heat reviving them.
As I stepped outside, a surge of energy rose in my body, rousing my senses. Everything was so acute—the air sweet with the scent of rotting leaves and the crisp chill of the wind on my face. Stronger than before and connected to this earth like no other. This sensation was new to me. My feet were ground to the floor as if I truly were a part of this wild nature, herself.
The cold air made my breath look like the smoke from a dragon’s mouth and a small stream of light peaked through to the back of this dank place where we lay hidden, forgotten. Dreaming.
I stretched and saw that day was parting now, just as winter had left the surrounding woods bare of their thick autumn greenery. Scents and colours, warm and vivid, it was bliss.
I remembered a sensation then, such an unusual feeling as I had left Nathaniel’s charred remains. The sense of being watched by something that I did not know or understand. But something that told my instincts to fear and to remember. A shiver ran over me, and I blinked quickly. Yes, something powerful and deadly. I slumped a bit at the thought. No, we would remain low key.
Nathaniel. I could feel him. I had drunk his blood. His genes had been mixed with mine. He was part of me and I knew he lived. I closed my eyes to breathe in his memory, his passion for life.
Though he had terrified Rachel, wicked and evil as he is, I was excited to know he was out there. My desire to see him was strong and I found myself thinking how heartless I must be, to long for the creature who could have killed my lover. But no more, as I had more strength than him.
In the beginning, I thought of him as a friend, a confidant. And he still was in his own fiendish way. Maybe my feelings towards his friendship were in part because it was him who had saved me at the beginning of this nightmare, or at least I thought he had. Before him, I was alone and terrified with this transformation of horror, and he had befriended me. And again, when destiny led me to a fate worse than death at the hands of the Elite, it was him that saved me. I didn’t trust him, but I did miss him.
An unsettling and strange power surged within me. It was a bit like wearing a new coat; I liked it but I didn’t fit it yet. Cumbersome but warm.
Emidius, it was said, was thousands of years old and protective of her fragile humans. To have her blood changes you, keeps you out of reach of humanity, and I had started to sense this.
Having seen the brutality of other vampires, I was determined not to succumb to that.
Wandering back into the crypt, I took one last deep breath, trying to drive away the darkness that haunted my soul. If the Elite found me now, I’d have to face them, but I was done with this. This was not living, and living is what I wanted now more than anything.
I found myself stooping over Rachel, her pale face and pink lips, an ethereal beauty. As I bent to kiss her a powerful yearning stirred in me. She awoke to find me drinking on her slender neck.
She sighed and I unlatched my teeth, looked at her, and grinned a bloody grin. Then I took her blood again and as my teeth sunk into her flesh, my passion awoke. As I drank from her I thought of all the people who I had bled, of my debauched past. It was as if my passion and blood lust were automated, animalistic and now I hated that. That as a vampire I cannot have one without the other. I wondered if she felt the same. Vampires, emotionally cold. Driven by sensation. It reminded me of a quote from Dorian Gray. He sought pleasure but that is not the same as happiness.
Rachel was the lover I had lived with, but she was not the same person now that she was a vampire. I listened to the pounding of her heart, and felt her emotion travel through me as her blood touched my lips, my tongue, and my throat. That incurable addiction. Blood is more intimate than sex. That sharing, the emotions and the knowledge coming from the giver, no secrets.
Covered in filth, the lust that had lain dormant came back like a force of nature.
“I love you, I missed you,” I told her as I grabbed her and held her close looking into her eyes, as lovers do. Searching for something more than lust, something deeper.
That kiss was powerful, Rachel with me and our blood mixed in our bodies, we were enraptured and my previous cold thoughts evaporated in an instant.
Now I felt connected like no other. I forgot about that feeling, that emotion about outside, about needing to be in life. Emotion is a powerful force. So I had answered my own question. I did feel deeper, emotionally connected, but I knew not all vampires did.
She was mine and I hers and the bond between us through blood and love felt unbreakable. Intense.
“Anthony,” she whispered her voice dry. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
“You won’t, I promise.”
Maybe we had transcended from lust to something else, something stirring, something profound. I hoped so. I hoped it wasn’t just me feeling this. Falling for an illusion like I had done so many times before.
Love is so consuming, so erotic no words could be spoken.
That night, we made love, laughing, loving, caressing. Until now, I hadn't known that was even possible as a vampire.
For three months, we'd slept in that dark crypt, arriving in autumn, and now the signs of winter had come I couldn't even remember when I last showered. But that hardly mattered. I'd just stay here with her and we would drink each other dry.
We lay there, like true children of the night, listening to the owls screeching and the foxes wailing in the distance. Bitter winds chilled my cold body more, but emotions inside me burned like a furnace. Nothing ventured near us and only the sounds of nature surrounded us. Dirty and dusty, we were happy.
Laying tog
ether in each other’s arms, on that soil floor, watching the shadows chase across the ceiling as the light moved and bounced around I felt peaceful. If it wasn’t for the hunger, I believe we could’ve stayed there indefinitely and just let the time of man pass us by and come out in maybe fifty years. But the hunger did start. Once awoken, it rages within our bodies like tidal waves, rushing on us and leaving us heady and dazed until we get our next fix. The blood of another vampire quickens us, but unless that vampire is powerful, it ceases to sustain us. My head spun and I felt disorientated. It was time to re-join the world.
What we would find out there we could only guess, so reluctantly we left our earthy haven and made the long walk back to civilisation.
But living; life yearned for me. Gripped by anticipation to return with Emidius’s blood in my veins, stronger than ever and my lover by my side. With that precious elixir my body, mind, and heart forever changed, wielding a power unmatched by my kin. I had felt that confidence growing inside me. Not designed for sedentary life, the mundane.
We ran mile after mile and I was determined to start over a new leaf, not to steal a life or a car this time.
“I wonder what we’ll find back home, who’s left. You know, Nathaniel refused to help you when you and Jamie went back to the Elite to destroy them,” Rachel spluttered.
“I saw him leave with you.” As I said that, her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. Before she could say any more I added, “Rachel, I had to make a choice. It’s not because I don’t care. If we didn’t destroy the Elite, there would be nothing, we wouldn’t be here now. Believe me, I would have rather been with you.”
Pausing a moment for the words to settle I continued, “Jamie and I took a bomb, two actually, made by a resistance group. We killed Tyrell, that mad leader and his foul son, Alexander. Actually, Tyrell lived through the bombing, but Jamie cut off his head! God it was gruesome, but appropriate. Then we hunted those things, the Experimentals. I was bitten by one, we failed in killing any, and Jamie took me to Emidius. Her blood saved me. Though she was insistent that Jamie could’ve done that.”