The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter (Book 1): Red Ashes

by Justin A. Moore

  Be trusting.

  Don’t worry.

  Help me.

  My uncle’s compulsion unraveled as those words echoed through my mind. Why hadn’t I been so astonished by being thrust into the world of vampires that I had known existed? Why had I not chosen to ignore it? Why had I flown after my uncle when he was caught? The symptoms were made clear to me: unquestioning loyalty, loss of habits, relying on allies who should have boggled me instead of evoking warmth. My mind shattered and I collapsed as my power—this ridiculous power that I hadn’t even the slightest real clue as to the nature of it—surged for a moment of unthinkable agony and then receded. Fresh horror and astonishment washed over me as I looked on my surroundings without my uncle’s filter clouding my perception. I was curled up on the floor, screaming.

  “Yes, now you see.” Thanatos’s voice oozed like sick, grey slime over my ears. I screamed again into the remorseless cistern. “It’s okay though, so much will be revealed to you, in time. You will have nothing to fear, for you will be one of us. Leon?”

  Leon rose slowly as his limbs reformed under his tattered suit. He flexed his fingers and then looked at me.

  “Why?!” I screamed; my thoughts were scattered with the horrible realizations stacked upon each other, but his apparent betrayal burned through. There were just too many missing pieces; why recommend fire? Why show us the way to reach him?

  “He keeps your uncle,” Leon grunted as his ribcage began regaining its shape. “My kind get you. That was the deal. Of course, we had to make it seem like you would have a real chance with so pitiful a weapon as a flamethrower, so that you would not take more… drastic measures.” He approached me and lifted me to my knees. “So you will become one of us. I am so glad you didn’t drag Lily into this fight. Had she become a nuisance, I may have had to dispose of her.” He smiled then, revealing his fangs.

  “Kid, fight through it,” My uncle said. My eyes shot to him and he looked forlornly at me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I thought it was the only way I could speak to you in your coma… but you’ve got to fight. There’s no grey area here. Damnit, I love you like a son. Do or die, bud, don’t let them take—”

  Thanatos lightly backhanded my uncle into the floor. He lay there, silent.

  And that was all I needed to burn through the shock and horror of so many revelations that had been buffered before. I had family. I wasn’t alone anymore. And that man loved me, without a doubt, enough to fight the most horrifying things I could think of. I thought of my promise to Hazel.

  “He’s not safe yet.” I muttered. Leon gave me a confused look. I felt Hazel’s presence from her sorcery on my jacket, and somehow, I heard her speak.

  “I rescind and forgive your promise.”

  I reached up with one hand, grabbed Leon’s head, and crushed it like a grapefruit. His mouth opened in a wild scream for a moment before I continued my work on his neck. He thrashed and pushed at me, but I reached into his chest and plucked out his heart. Power roared through me like I couldn’t believe. Every hair on my body stood on end with frightful energy as I tossed Leon’s rapidly disintegrating corpse aside. I rushed forward and punched Thanatos in the face with all of my might. He disappeared into the darkness, his eyes wide in shock before he plummeted into the shadows through a tunnel in the back of the cistern. I knelt down to my uncle as vampires all around us shrieked in terror and confusion.

  “Kid we need to get outta here, your body can’t take that shit. Look at your hands,” He said dazedly. I looked, and sure enough blood was slowly beginning to seep from under my fingernails. Tiny cuts had begun to open in my skin, and it took a small but conscious effort of will to heal them again. I ignored it for the moment and pulled the crumpled but unbroken bottles of herbal concoction from my jacket.

  “Drink these; I need you to be able to run.”

  “Might take a bit, bud, but alright,” He said before going into a coughing fit. My natural worry was overwhelmed by my curiosity at how each cough wracked his body, my power distorting my thought process further. I took a moment to recover myself as he pulled the cap from a bottle and began to drink. I turned around.

  Thanatos stood in front of his throne once more, but this time his smile was replaced by a thin line. There was no evidence that I had ever hit him. And then he was gone for an instant before I felt something settle on my shoulder. I looked over and saw the pale spider of his hand as it slowly tightened on the leather. I grabbed onto it to try and pull it free, but it was completely immobile.

  “Do you know what force is, John?” He asked. I didn’t see his fist, but it collided with my abdomen with the force of a small meteor. It hurt, badly, even through the protection that my jacket bestowed. I didn’t go flying this time, though my feet did leave the ground. Thanatos’s hand anchored me in place, and I saw his clawed toes digging into the cement.

  “Mass times acceleration, John. That is force. Power. Strength. I may not have much in the manner of personal mass, but I have become a master of manipulating it to great effect.” His voice was calm and cold, and his fist struck the same spot again pushing my breath out of my chest. It was a curious sensation, because it didn’t hurt aside from the punch itself and I didn’t feel the immediate need for air, my diaphragm quivered lightly in my chest and then settled again, letting me breathe.

  “He who can move the most mass the fastest has the most power, boy. I can move thousands of my children at once, you can only move yourself.” He breathed into my ear before his fist crashed into my solar plexus again. He waited until I caught my breath and I spoke.

  “I think I can move you,” I said, and then I tightened my grip on his arm and jumped upward, jerking him free of his anchor and flying like a rocket towards the ceiling with him in tow. After twenty feet of straight climb, I twisted in the air and whipped him towards the ceiling as hard as I could, my muscles tearing and repairing from the effort. Thanatos lashed around me and flew towards the ceiling. The impact shook the entire room, and stonework fell all around as I landed lightly on the floor. Thanatos shot down from the ceiling and landed hard on his feet, snarling as his toes dug into the rubble of his impact, his nails screeching as if against a chalkboard as he pulverized the stone further.

  “Pretentious brat,” He spat. “I’m going to drive you to your knees, and teach you why mankind grew to fear what lurks in the shadows.” As he spoke, his aura shifted and began to grow. With sudden ferocity, his obscured the entire room and filled it like smoke, even obscuring his own form. I felt a brush of wind.

  My face exploded in pain, as did my legs. My jacket rippled around me as sledgehammer blows impacted me from all sides. I felt the pressure in my head begin to grow again, and I punched at each impact in the darkness. Twice my fist contacted marble-hard flesh that I recognized as Thanatos, but neither blow seemed to stem the tide of attacks rained upon me. The pressure continued to build in my mind, approaching some apex. My body reacted to the growing power by increasing the flow through my own limbs, until I was whirling about striking out into the darkness and screaming soundlessly as my fists occasionally found purchase against a bit of vampire skin. At once I felt Thanatos’s hands grip my head and lift me off my feet. His red-on-black eyes came out of the darkness an inch in front of mine.

  “Rest now, Magnusson. This battle is over.” And then I felt as if a lightning bolt struck me, so hard was the crushing impact of the blow against the back of my skull. My vision swam and the pressure in my mind receded completely as the power left my limbs. I tried to regain purchase on it, but it was gone. My power, finally, had given out. Hard.

  I settled to my knees as the darkness began to shrink back and dissipate, and then I fell to my side and dry heaved at the floor, bile surging in my stomach. I wondered if I had a concussion, or if the back of my head was missing. My wounds abruptly stopped healing, but at least I wasn’t bleeding out. Thanatos knelt in front of me, wearing his smile from before. I could see the small bits of bruising from wher
e my fists had crushed into him already fading.

  “There now, just relax.” Thanatos said. “I really hadn’t wanted to get directly involved, but at times it cannot be helped. I must ask you, what happened to the coquettish little vampire girl you’ve been running around with?”

  “Lily…” I murmured.

  “That’s the one.” He said not unkindly.

  “Locked her up. Protection.” I mumbled again. I didn’t know why I was answering his questions, but it seemed absurd not to.

  “How gallant of you. I would have done the same, when I was human.”

  “You were human?” I asked, genuinely surprised. My head throbbed painfully as I spoke, but I felt like if I didn’t keep talking that I’d either pass out or he would do something horrible to me.

  “Oh yes, in fact, that’s why you’re here. Well, at least in part.” He said and grabbed my left arm. I hadn’t realized it was broken until he gave it a firm yank and the bone set. I gave a short yelp and ground my teeth together as he went to work on my other limbs, setting breaks and seating dislocations. “You’ve become far more powerful than I realized, John. Every hit from you was like taking a hit from cannon fire, but you’re young. You’re going to be so much stronger in such a short time.”

  “You still want to turn us.”

  “Oh, yes, very much so. That’s the thing, you see, I need you. We need you. We’re going to bring back the Father. The progenitor of all of our kinds. My brothers and sisters claimed it couldn’t be done, but I know better. I am, after all, the eldest son.” Thanatos smiled guilefully.

  “Why? What do you need us for? Who’s this Father?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure you have questions, and we’ll get to that in time. But first we have some painful business to get to, and I’m sure you will want to rest afterwards. This will only take a few moments, try and close your eyes.”

  He opened his mouth wide, exposing his fangs which shone brightly in the dim light. I tried to push him away, but my body was just too weak, and the toll my abuse of my power was exacting on me was immense. I was, in fact, mostly numb now, and cold as if I had been burned to the point of nerve damage. Thanatos’s mouth closed over my forearm, and I didn’t even feel pain, just the sensation of becoming progressively more light-headed.

  Then an explosion happened overhead.

  I looked up to see the center of the dome begin to crumble as more deafening impacts shook the room. Thanatos pulled his bloodied mouth away from my arm and looked himself, confusion etched into his face. After the fifth deafening crash, the center of the ceiling fell into a pile in the center, crushing the iron throne and burying it under tons of debris. Thanatos walked to the center of the room and looked up at the gaping hole overhead, as did the rest of the vampires in the room. Then the pile started to move.

  The vampires swarmed over the pile, plucking off rocks and tossing them aside, and then at once they all stopped and looked at something. I couldn’t see what they saw, but I heard something. Very faint from my distance, but clear and echoing all the same. I understood the shock the vampires expressed right before they flew into panic, and I myself felt the overwhelming urge to crawl as far away as possible as fear gripped my heart. It was an irrational fear born from the deepest recesses of the human mind, a kind of genetic knowledge that caused the overwhelming and unassailable overdrive of the fight-or-flight response. The sound that we heard with such clarity as to instantly nearly wet ourselves was not a sound that would normally cause someone fear. It was breathing, and it was animal.

  The pile exploded violently as the fifteen-foot tall werewolf drew itself up to its full height and roared. I say roar instead of howl because the sound that issued forth from that maw was unlike any howl I had ever heard. The blare of it literally vibrated my bones and was intensely painful. It was a cacophony of sound that you would expect to hear issue from a fiery red crack plunging straight into hell. One part animal, one part clearly human female, and one part something completely unnatural and incomprehensible that made my bladder constrict involuntarily as adrenaline surged through my veins and snuffed out my exhaustion.

  The shape of the werewolf was unlike what I was expecting. First, the sheer size of it was beyond daunting, easily twice the height of a tall man to the shoulder, and maybe five feet or more across from shoulder to shoulder as well. The hind legs were notably wolf-like, with large paws the size of manhole covers. Long arms—much more heavily muscled than the rest of the body—reached nearly to the floor ending in huge clawed hands. The tail appeared to be little more than an afterthought, classically long and bushy, while the head was something out of a horror movie. The snout was relatively short and thick, without the hanging lips and extra flesh of a true canine, but instead with human-looking lips drawn away from dagger teeth, each of which was a weapon in its own right. The nose was canine, but lacked the differentiation of flesh that was normal and was instead covered in the same skin as the rest of the face. The face itself, which I would have expected to be covered in the same shaggy fur as the rest of the body, was instead relatively hairless with only short tufts around the muzzle and cheeks, with long fur not descending beyond the brow. The eyes pierced me, and realization dawned as I stared into them.

  “Cassie? Is that you?” I whispered. The werewolf snarled and walked towards me, each step shaking the stone floor. A vampire jumped onto her back and she carelessly batted it away, rending it to pieces that burned up before hitting the floor. She knelt and sniffed me, her hot breath and animal scent washing over me. She paused for a moment and pointed her muzzle directly and uncomfortably into my groin in true canine fashion, no doubt because I had soiled myself in fear moments earlier. After a moment, she looked back at me and inhaled deeply a few more times and then picked me up roughly and pinned me to the wall. Her strength was incredible, and I groaned as the force of her hand gripping me drove the air from my lungs. She seemed to notice and lessened the pressure as she slid one claw down the zipper of my jacket.

  The teeth separated musically, each one making a noise like a violin string snapping as it broke, until it came apart at the middle. Her claw eagerly brushed open the right side of it and she clawed open at the exposed inside, shredding cloth and leather alike as her frustration made her squeeze me a bit tighter before she found what she was looking for. After a few painful seconds she dropped me and held on a single claw her prize—Hazel’s locket, glittering in the dim light. She promptly tossed it into the air and snapped it up in her jaws, swallowing it. Then she turned her attention back to me and snuffled at my jacket a few more times before dropping me and letting out another earth-shaking roar.

  “Slay the dog,” Thanatos said, wearing a moue of disgust. The rest of the vampires, about forty of them, charged screaming at Cassie.

  Cassie turned around and faced the rushing tide of vampires and let forth an excited, throaty growl. She charged into them with seemingly gleeful abandon, her razor claws sending clouds of gore and burning ash all over the room, and her jaws snapping shut over faces and limbs, separating them and then spitting out the remains. As I watched the slaughter I felt something bump my leg and looked down—it was a water bottle full of amber-brown liquid. I looked up and saw my uncle still sitting against the wall, but he was imploring me with his hands to drink. I lifted the bottle to my lips and pulled the top out with my teeth. The lukewarm liquid rushed into my mouth and instantly the warm tingling sensation radiated from my stomach into the rest of my body. But nothing else.

  In thirty seconds, maybe less, the only vampire who remained in the fight was Thanatos himself. An assortment of old and young vampires, some brutally maimed, lined the far edge of the wall.

  “I’ll admit, John,” Thanatos said, his voice much louder than normal. “Even I didn’t predict that you would ally yourself with such a disgusting creature at the risk of suicide. No matter, I’ll return to you once I’ve—” Cassie charged him, cutting him off, and grabbed him in both claws. He struggled wit
h his arms pinned at his side as she worried at his head and chest like he was a chew toy. Dust and ash vibrated from her fur as she shook him viciously, and then suddenly she howled in pain and dropped him. One of her “hands” was twisted the wrong way and sat oddly on her wrist. She growled and twisted it, evoking another howl over the grinding sound of bones reseating.

  Thanatos disappeared and reappeared behind her, and grabbed her left leg and swung her into the air. She contorted wildly as he held her aloft for a brief moment, and then I saw his right foot shoot down into the rock up to his shin as he brought her down with a strained yell. She slammed into the stone, knocking yet more mud and dirt and piping loose from overhead and snarled balefully as she doubled up and slashed at him with her claws. Rivulets of blood sprayed and poured from him before he swung her into the air again and brought her down on the opposite side. This time I heard the snapping of bone and a grunt escaped Cassie’s maw, but no threatening growl this time as she desperately clawed at Thanatos until he hoisted her and slammed her a third time. And a forth. And a fifth. Then with his sixth and last heave he threw her at the wooden entry door, which exploded into splinters as she hit it.

  Cassie let out an almost human groan as she pulled herself unsteadily up onto all fours, looking surprisingly more wolfish despite being wounded. Thanatos sank to one knee but stared at her with cold calculation—her attacks had caused serious damage, even while he swung her, and a multitude of cuts were refusing to heal. His skin looked even more chalky and thin as he lost blood, but I knew that alone wouldn’t kill him while he could just feed from my uncle or me. As if fate had a sense of humor, Cassie ran into the room—I could hear her bones snapping back into place now, as if her regeneration couldn’t be stopped by any means—and jumped up to the ceiling, clinging to it with her claws. She gave me a look that mingled both the look a person gives you after they’ve failed a task and the look a dog gives you when it knows it’s done something wrong, and then climbed up out of the hole.