by Gaja J. Kos
Still, her body tensed when Jürgen accompanied Katja into the room, every tendon ridden with the anticipation of battle.
The vampire sat in the last remaining armchair, a hint of uncertainty lining the soft lines of her mouth. Jürgen hovered behind her, leaning his muscular arms on the fleur-de-lis-patterned headrest, looking no more pleased than the rest of the pack.
“Katja,” Evelin began, shifting forward on the sofa; she brushed her sleek black hair behind her ears and focused her gaze on the vampire. “How long have you known Lara?”
The vampire’s forehead wrinkled together in a delicate frown. “Why?” she asked cautiously.
“Just answer, Schatzi,” Jürgen said behind her, the words so soft they were almost intimate, delicate.
That fragment of normalcy unlocked something within the vampire. Katja exhaled a long breath of air and squared her shoulders. The hesitation slowly faded away from her features, replaced by the sharp, goal-oriented expression the weres had come to know her by.
“We’ve been working together at the casino for just over five years,” she explained, locking her hands together in front of her. “We started hanging out during the first months on the job, became good friends less than a year later.”
“And Damir?” Evelin asked, cocking her head to the side.
The vampire winced at the name, but didn’t waver. “He and Lara were already dating when we became acquainted,” Katja continued in a collected tone. “It was nice meeting another perfectly normal twentyfourhourly, and the three of us hit it off right away. They were— They were the cutest couple I’ve ever seen. Never made me feel like a third wheel or anything.”
The last words were spoken with a smile; the thought of their time together warmed Katja’s features, softening the sharp line of her jaw. But underneath it lay the black abyss of her friend’s loss, of her loss as well. And no amount of softness could hide it.
It was Tim who spoke next, his voice cutting through the moment. “So you knew him pretty well?”
The vampire nodded, her loose chestnut curls falling over her shoulders in a protective caress.
“How well versed was he in sensing others of your kind?”
Katja bit her lip and shook her head to the side firmly. “Not good. Damir was older than me, but had one of the weakest radiuses of all the vamps I’ve met.”
Rose and Zarja exchanged a discreet look in the background. They had just received a part of the confirmation they’d sought. Rose nodded at the brown-haired werewolf beside her, her face stern, but controlled. Before a second had passed, Zarja uncrossed her arms and walked over to the love seat where Mark and Evelin sat, her palms wrapping around the top of the cushioned back.
“Have you ever heard of an Upir?” the were asked, containing a low growl that wanted to spill from her lips.
The atmosphere in the room turned chilly. Katja sat motionless in the armchair, controlling her breathing; only her fingers shifted, fisted tightly into the fabric of the edge roll.
“The living vampire,” she hissed, turning her gaze to the werewolves in front of her, almost as if she expected to find her reaction mirrored. “Creatures with two souls.”
Rose nodded absentmindedly. Sebastian had spat the words as well. The living vampire. Rose had asked Veles about the elusive race upon the god’s return from the underworld, almost hoping that he would deny the Kresnik’s words.
But Sebastian had been right.
This time, about everything.
And Veles only added fuel to the fire.
The Upir was the only kind of vampire that carried the predisposition to enter Veles’s realm; the unique nature of the creatures—the abominations, as Veles had called them—granted them a status no other living being had. No other being should have.
And that peculiar trait unlocked the gates of the underworld for them to spend eternity in.
The occasions were rare, since the ancient creatures knew how to protect their lives to a remarkable, almost awe-inspiring point—despite there being nothing awe-inspiring about the Upir. But when death did touch them, those individuals passed through the gates just as easily as a human would.
But only a part of them.
The vampiric soul nestled inside their bodies would remain somewhere out of Veles’s reach, much like any other. Invisible, or lost… Or simply nonexistent, as Veles believed his would be once his reign came to an end.
But the other, the one pertaining to the witch-spirit every Upir carried within them, would continue its ethereal path, finding home in the light of the underworld.
“Bloody half-breeds,” Katja muttered in disgust, her fingers slowly lessening the death grip they held on the armchair.
“I take it you don’t like them too much?” Rose asked, arching a single eyebrow.
It wouldn’t surprise her. Not if the man they were dealing with was an Upir himself. And as Sebastian had conveyed, Upirs were outsiders.
With the unnatural possession of two souls, they fit neither here nor there. Unclassifiable. And highly unpredictable. The most lethal opponent one could have.
“Upirs believe themselves to be above everybody else,” Katja spat. “And because they can shift between witch—well, even human in a way—and vampire any damn time they please, they can pull off a whole lot of shit and blame it on the other race, the one of the form in which they hadn’t wreaked havoc.
“And the worst of it all is that they do it out of ennui. Out of fucking immortal boredom. Because it amuses them.”
The fomenter that walks the line between races. The Koldunya’s words echoed again in Rose’s mind.
After she had spoken with Evelin, combining their newly obtained knowledge and shoving away the dread crawling down their spines, the pieces of the puzzle finally came together.
It made sense. But not all of it.
Definitely not all of it.
Evelin focused her hard stare on the agitated vampire, wishing there was another way to do this. “Did you ever sense one at Lara and Damir’s place?”
Katja’s eyes bled to red at the question, a hint of fang protruding from her lips; but the vampire remained in control, the fury boiling just beneath her skin. She relaxed her fisted hands further, smoothing down the slight curve of the armrests.
Finally, as if the motion pained her, she shook her head.
“Damir was the only vampire there,” Katja said, but the words were carried on a wind of tender caution, formed into an unvoiced query.
“Not once?” Evelin asked quietly, without any force seeping into her tone.
The vamp resolutely shook her head again.
“Fuck.”
If the Upir managed to slip under Katja’s radar... Rose thought, pushing the words through the bond. To think that someone was powerful enough to conceal themselves so thoroughly wasn’t only bad. It bordered on the we’re fucked kind of bad. Perhaps even surpassed it.
No wonder no one noticed the fucker at the theater, Jürgen growled back, emotion trickling onto his face. He placed his hands on Katja’s shoulder, gently running his thumbs down the base of her neck, unknotting the tense, wound-up tendons.
“Would an Upir be able to perform the art of occultation?” he asked, not breaking contact with her skin.
Katja peered up at the werewolf, her eyes filled with unbarred hostility. “Perform? The sonovabitches invented the damn thing.”
Rose crossed the room in a blur, coming to kneel in front of the chestnut-haired vamp. “But if they were to use influence over another vampire while hiding beneath the veil of occultation...?”
“The veil would slip,” Katja replied, seeming somewhat surprised by Rose’s train of thought. Her brows furrowed together. “Not even an ancient one can command both forces at once.”
“Good.” Rose nodded, her words holding an edge of a growl. “Then we’ve got the bastard.”
She looked over her shoulder, silently motioning Evelin to approach. The were pulled a folded piece of paper
out of her coat pocket as she walked over and handed it to Katja, her expression grave.
“We found Vaclav,” Evelin said solemnly before she returned to her seat, her doe-eyes never leaving Katja’s face.
She didn’t doubt the vampire’s innocence; even with her exceptional skills of detection, Katja couldn’t have known. Not if Vaclav was everything they believed him to be.
Still, Evelin wanted to see the vampire’s reaction. If only to learn how bad the situation truly was.
Katja unfolded the paper, her eyes scanning the weres in the room. None of them moved, locked in their places. The silence was thick, the room suffocating as if all the air had been sucked out, replaced by nothing but solid tension.
Katja dropped her gaze, a streak of curses leaving her fanged mouth as her fingers dug into the sketch, tearing through the paper.
The portrayed person was younger; there were subtle differences in the features, transforming them into someone who was not quite the same—yet not different enough to separate the sketch of the vampire from the human Katja knew.
There wasn’t even a sliver of doubt lingering within Katja's mind.
She was looking at the vampiric image of Lara’s uncle.
Chapter 30
Katja stalked along the narrow path cut into the gray, blackened snow, her thoughts darker than the sky above her. With every step, she fought the impulse to run, to tap into that enhanced speed she had continued to hone through the decades, and to close the distance to the werewolves. To the wrath they carried inside them, so similar to her own.
But she couldn’t attract attention. Even being who she was, her vampiric essence, could compromise the plan if she wasn't careful enough.
The industrial zone was vast, a long rectangle of bleak establishments, divided by scattered parking lots and cracked roads. A heinous part of town, and the pack had set their meeting point at the very edge of it, where the highway roared behind a thick cement wall—and where they would be as far away from Pelican Foods as possible.
Even if Vaclav’s vamp sensor surpassed Katja’s—which she had no doubts about—the presence of a single vampire located quite a few factories away wouldn’t raise any suspicions. Not with the proximity of a solitary bus station the various employees frequented.
She turned a corner and crossed the packed parking lot, weaving between the snow-covered cars.
Soon. So very soon. Her fingers curled at the thought.
Vaclav had done an exceptional job of transforming into Perko.
It shouldn’t have surprised her.
Deceptions based on a shard of truth were always the most believable ones. And with power such as his—everything else was child’s play. By virtue of his warlock soul, Vaclav had been able to age his human form, presenting what one would expect from an uncle. And since he had only entered Lara’s life a few years before, supposedly returning to his homeland from Australia—where he had migrated for work even before Lara was born—Perko didn’t even have to deal with the nuisance of keeping up appearances. A couple of wrinkles every now and then, and nobody blinked twice in his direction.
Cursing under her breath, Katja progressed between the parked vehicles. Not being able to fight Vaclav/Perko, at least not until the werewolves made their move on him, put her in a sour mood. She wanted to see the expression on his face when his plans fell to pieces. Wanted to be the first to draw blood from his lying, corrupted flesh.
Although the Upir was, in fact, related to her friend, Perko had nonetheless infiltrated Lara’s life, using her mother’s death to give himself a clean slate and a warm welcome. If Magda had known her supposed stepbrother was a vampire, she hadn’t passed the knowledge on to her daughter.
And why would she? Vampires in the family weren’t unusual in these times; they weren’t something that a person would put out a banner for and shout about it. It would have been just as silly as proclaiming a relative’s sexuality.
Diverse families had become the norm in the past hundred years, not an exception.
Katja hated having to dump the your-uncle-is-a-murderous-Upir news on Lara, hated being the one to rip her friend’s reality apart and then leave her to deal with it alone. But the sooner she and the pack got to Vaclav, the better. They would have time to track just how Vaclav had kept such a low profile, concealing his twin personality, yet managed to stay connected to Lara’s family after the tendrils of death greeted the Upir. If Lara even wished to.
A flash of blond hair in the distance brought a smile to Katja’s face. The warmth and familiarity of the sight lessened the bottled-up anger that had grown to the point where it threatened to spill overboard and cast her into her own state of bloodlust. She maneuvered between two closely parked trucks and found the pack waiting behind a slightly rusty delivery van, barely noticeable swirls of heat rising from their bodies.
The werewolves greeted her with a murderous gleam saturating their eyes. Except for Rose—whose body was wrapped in black, skin-tight attire—all of them were dressed in loose clothing, designed to tear easily. They looked odd in their sweatpants and old shirts in the middle of the snow-covered parking lot, but then again, Katja understood the irrelevance of multiple layers of clothing. She agreed completely with Jürgen’s reasoning—unless they had to stand still for a long amount of time, being huddled in jackets and coats was merely something they tolerated to keep up appearances.
Much like her, Rose sported daggers and knives strapped to every convenient location on her body. The werewolf nodded in acknowledgment when Katja joined them, squeezing between the twins’ muscular frames.
“Did Perko spend any time with Damir that day?” Rose asked, raising an eyebrow.
Even without the final confirmation, they had him. Vaclav, the majority shareholder at Pelican Foods, personally inspected their shipments of blood, including the one that was served to Vito at Metulj. Perko, by his own admission in addition to the photographic evidence, was at the theater at their opening night; his human persona slipped for those few moments while he was exercising his influence over Simon—which he couldn’t have done in his warlock form—who, in effect, handed the laced glass to Alex.
It might not have been enough for the police to issue an arrest warrant, as Tomo had explained with a small twitch of his mouth, but it was enough for them.
Yet one question remained unanswered.
The pack had no difficulty believing the ancient vamp killed someone he didn’t even know and someone who he had seen at the theater a few times. They were twentyfourhourlies, the weaker kind of vampire in the eyes of someone who walked a more traditional path.
But going after his niece’s husband was a whole other matter. Even if the deceased hadn’t been a traditional.
“Lara couldn’t give me a definite answer.” Katja exhaled, her fingers trailing the handle of the knife she carried securely in a thigh sheath. “She said it’s possible Tomaž stopped by Damir’s office—he had done it quite a few times before; and it wasn’t even all that unusual since Vaclav’s human persona frequented a restaurant in the vicinity. After a time, Damir ceased to mention these visits unless something of importance had surfaced during their talks.”
“Two out of three confirmed. That’s more than enough for me,” Jens growled, flashing his canine teeth.
Zarja snarled and broke through the circle without pause. “Agreed,” she spat over her shoulder, her form disappearing behind the vehicles.
The pack followed her across the parking lot and pushed deeper into the industrial zone, leaving Katja’s silhouette in the distance. Rose glanced back, taking in the vampire's form one last time. Katja would join them only after they had entered the building and Jürgen tipped her off via an app on his phone Tim had set up for them. When activated, it emitted a signal that they were on the verge of engaging the vamp, and would act as an invitation for Katja to participate in the action.
The werewolves stalked past the grim warehouses and factories, their destination set.
>
Evelin had obtained a detailed report from Tomo about where they would find Vaclav in the hours of early evening; the workers—although with no recollection of the vampire’s image—had been able to give clear times as to when Vaclav did his rounds. And unless one of those people who had consented to give the pack access to the premises tipped the Upir off, he couldn’t know they were coming. A sitting duck in a room with only one exit.
Pelican Foods’ building was a typical warehouse/office hybrid built in the seventies—an ugly gray mass of concrete, three stories high with limited windows. A depressing work environment. But very good for stealth.
The pack entered by the back door, which was—as Tomo had arranged it—unlocked. There weren’t any security cameras covering the entrance, and as far as they knew, the hallway behind the door was lacking surveillance as well. If it was Vaclav’s ego convincing him that nobody would dare rob his establishment or some decision to cut back on expenses, the pack didn’t care. Their way was clear, and that was all that mattered.
They pushed inside, following the floor plan Tomo had provided. The blood section lay on the ground floor, three turns away. The pack spotted workers in several of the rooms they passed, but the hallways were empty. The contact from Pelican Foods had told Tomo they could expect as much. Night shifts placed fewer people in the building, and those who did punch in for the unfortunate hours usually stuck to their workstations. It appeared that Vaclav’s presence made the workers uneasy, whether they knew the vampire was present or not.
And Rose had no trouble imagining why.
There was a slight tingle in the air, like a warning, urging you to turn around the closer you got to the blood sector.
It was different than the wards placed around the Kolduny’s sacred circle, more hostile, more vile.
Katja had called the sensation a vamp’s very own insect repellant—where the insects were none other than human beings. If Rose had felt a small alarm ringing within her as she progressed through the invisible field, a regular person would have been drenched in dread by the time they drew this close.