Destiny of the Vampire (Adventures of the Vampire Book 1)

by P. D. McClafferty

  Max groaned, thinking of the border crossings and the current unstable military situation.

  “Don’t worry. Magic can be used for a number of useful pastimes, like changing your passport, ID card, and credit card.” She bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Hacking ATMs is almost as easy.”

  “You can hack passports, ID cards, and ATMs?” he asked in disbelief as one of the foundations of modern society fell to magic. She smiled, and Max shook his head before he continued. “It’s not that. It’s fourteen hundred kilometers driving distance to Bursa, Turkey, and then another one hundred to the Heiropolis. My Romanian is passable, but my Turkish is terrible.”

  Viorela smiled widely. “I have just the runespell for that. Watch my finger again…”

  The gray 1974 Citroen 2cv6 listed slightly to port, squatting on half-bald tires. Max groaned the first time he saw it, but on second thought, the car, if it could really be called a car, made him grin. Totally unremarkable, it wasn’t enough to tempt anybody to get their hands dirty trying to steal it. If he was lucky, nobody would even see it in the general crush of dirty dented vehicles. The small used car lot in Brașov, fifteen kilometers to the north of Râșnov, agreed to replace the battery and tune up the engine… for a price. Max just hoped the clutch was good for a few thousand more kilometers.

  Viorela and Ilena gave the car matching askance looks as Max pulled up in front of the cottage.

  “Are you sure it will make the trip?” Ilena, a pretty dark-haired girl in her late twenties, asked.

  Max grinned. “Reasonably. As long as it makes it to Turkey, I’m golden.”

  She nodded uncertainly as Viorela handed him a wicker lunch basket and a thermos of strong Romanian coffee.

  “For your trip,” she whispered.

  Max took the food and coffee, kissed the women, and clambered into the car, wincing as the springs creaked in protest. The inside smelled of cigarettes and sour sweat. In sharp contrast to the outside, the engine caught on the first crank and purred like a kitten. Both his stomach and his wallet were full, and his clothes, if not new or flashy, were at least serviceable and nondescript.

  Autoroute 1A out of Brașov was a well-maintained two-lane highway with light traffic, and the Citroen moved well. Autoroute A3 out of Ploiești was another matter altogether, and the little car struggled to make one hundred kmph, to say nothing of the road’s maximum of one hundred thirty. For that reason, Max altered his plans, driving on smaller roads to the port city of Constanța, where he could catch the newly opened vehicle ferry to Istanbul.

  Istanbul was a bustling, seething city of sixteen million, with a yellow haze of air pollution visible for many kilometers. Skirting the city, Max turned the nose of the Citroen toward Bursa, dismayed by the traffic and how much it had cost him in bribes to enter the country unmolested.

  Viorela had assured him that his passport would pass any inspection, but he had his doubts. The language runespell she had taught him worked surprisingly well. As the customs inspector had greeted him in Turkish, Max drew the rune out of sight as he whispered the ancient word for spirit: inspiratio. The agent’s unintelligible gibberish suddenly became crystal-clear speech, and the man blinked in astonishment when Max replied in kind. Max had folded a US ten-dollar bill into his passport before he handed it to the customs inspector. When the man handed the passport back an instant later, the bill was gone, and Max had no further delays.

  Max stopped at the first small decent-looking hotel he came to on the outskirts of Bursa, Turkey, a modest city of three and a half million, and called it a day.

  The trip to the Ploutonian at Heiropolis was longer and more circuitous than he’d expected, adding to his tension, and his fourteen-hundred-kilometer trip rapidly approached two thousand before he arrived. Several jets—sometimes Turkish F-16s and, occasionally, Russian Sukhoi Su-24s—had buzzed him since he’d left Bursa. The Middle East conflict seemed to be heating up and spilling into Turkey.

  The town of Pamukkale, Turkey, had lost nearly half of its population, dropping from twenty-five hundred down to fifteen hundred, thanks to the nearby battles and an uncertain future. The house Max chose had burned at one time, leaving only three walls and half the roof of the main house remaining. The single-car garage appeared to be intact, and after some work dragging aside the battered garage door, Max managed to back the Citroen into the parking area with little difficulty. After that, it was simply a matter of replacing the garage door and artfully simulating a wrecked and abandoned building. He glanced up worriedly as jets roared overhead. In the distance, a long, thin column of smoke rose into the sky.

  With the car as safe as he could make it, Max shrugged into a loose sand-colored burnoose he’d purchased in Bursa and donned his well-worn backpack. The ruins of Heiropolis and the gateway itself were only a kilometer distant, and picking up his staff, Max began to walk. In the deepening twilight, his mind wandered. The layover in Bursa had been costly but more than worth his time. In the end, he found himself equipped with stout military surplus hiking gear, a used USMC Ka-Bar combat knife, and a very special walking staff. Head high and four centimeters in diameter at the center, tapering to two and a half centimeters at the ends, the staff was made of solid titanium and anodized to look like wood. Light, especially thanks to his vampiric muscles, and unbreakable, it was an ideal nondescript weapon. For a number of reasons, he’d opted not to carry a firearm. If he was captured, he could explain a staff and a knife, but explaining a pistol would be… difficult. His tan desert boots were brand new Marine Corps issue, and the fact that he’d found a pair in his size, in Bursa Turkey should have surprised him, but it didn’t.

  The Ploutonian gateway itself was no more than an arched doorway. Superstitious locals had filled the lower half with stone to prevent anyone from entering the underworld or, more importantly, from exiting it. Max raised his hand, palm facing the sealed doorway, and he could feel the pulsing power of the gateway. He sat down on a rock a few dozen meters away and sipped his water, waiting for full night to arrive. Under his feet, the ground trembled from an airstrike that rumbled like thunder in the distance, and the dry, hot air smelled of dust and crumbled dreams.

  Sometime after midnight, Max stirred and stepped out of the shadows. In his vampiric vision, the surface of the portal appeared to shimmer slightly, beckoning him on like a pool of fresh water. His senses told him there was nobody within a half kilometer. He’d had plenty of time to mull his options and had finally decided to run through the portal, on the off chance that someone on the other side was waiting for a traveler to step through. If friends were waiting, he would apologize later, but if enemies were waiting…

  Max checked his knife and pack, pulled down the hood of his burnoose, and gripped his staff tightly. Then he put down his head and charged the portal at a run. If someone had been watching, they would have seen him step through solid stone… to disappear from the face of the Earth.

  Chapter 3

  AEYAQAR

  The flames from the bonfire built before the gateway easily reached three meters high. When Max burst through, he hit the edge of the fire with one booted foot and gave an adrenaline-powered jump, sailing over the rest of the fiery logs amid the shouts and curses of the dozen men guarding the gateway. One man made a grab for Max, who lashed out with his staff, catching the armored man in the knee. Max heard the bones break, and the man went down, screaming and clutching his ruined leg. Max ran into the dark forest as, behind him, soldiers collected their weapons and prepared a pursuit.

  Ducking and weaving through the mix of conifer and deciduous trees, he noted that the air smelled as sweet and as fresh as his home in the North Carolina mountains. After a half kilometer of bulling his way through the woods, he slowed, turning to the side and veering back toward the fire. He was very careful on his return trip, to leave no sign of his passing. It was something he’d done in the pa
st, and having his life depend on his woods skills tended to sharpen his technique.

  Five armored men stood around the fire as another five looked apprehensively into the woods. Max made a subtle gesture, murmuring a single word for the spell Viorela had taught him to allow him to understand a strange language. A tall, cadaverous-looking man in a hooded black cloak pulled up to hide his face was standing beside the fire, berating one of the men at his side.

  “…catch all people coming through the gateway, without exception. Was that so hard to ask?” his high-pitched voice almost snarled.

  “No, your excellency,” a stout soldier in blindingly burnished armor replied. Max guessed it was an officer. “I’ll go and see if the sergeant is about ready.” The stocky officer strode to the five who were about to leave, and Max was surprised to hear their whispered conversation, despite the distance. He was learning more and more about the spells he cast.

  “Sir?” The sergeant stiffened, saluting.

  “Don’t do that, Amos. It makes me tired. Just take your men a league or two into the forest and set up camp for the night. Come back at first light looking suitably bedraggled and tell us that you chased the person for five leagues before he gave you the slip. Tell us that you suspect he may have been a werewolf from the tracks you saw.”

  The sergeant looked shocked. “There are werewolves around here, Colonel?” His voice was worried.

  “Not as far as I know, and there never were. That stranger didn’t head out toward South Brosthik, did he?”

  “No, sir.” The sergeant pointed to the far side of the camp, where a vague path disappeared into the forest. “South Brosthik is that way.” His arm swung, pointing at the forest on the other side of the camp. “The stranger went that way.”

  The colonel nodded. “Good. Now get out of here before I get yelled at again.”

  The sergeant saluted again, stifling a grin. “At your command, sir!” He turned and began barking orders at the other four men.

  Hiding in the brush, Max buried a laugh. Soldiers are soldiers, whether they wear digicams or helmet and cuirass and carry a short sword. Viorela had told him that Aeyaqar was a medieval society, but it obviously hadn’t progressed any in the six hundred years she had been on Earth—and that disturbed him. Perhaps he would find out more in South Brosthik, wherever that was. Swinging wide around the camp, Max quickly found the path the sergeant had pointed to, and turned off toward the unknown town.

  For the very first time, Max, using his vampiric quickness, knocked down a fat rabbit with no more than his knife, and sitting on a fallen tree, he ate it raw. It didn’t bother him as much as he’d thought it would, and it came as something of a shock when he found the taste of hot blood and fresh flesh invigorating. He washed up in a nearby stream and continued down the road toward South Brosthik.

  “Stand and deliver!” a bearded man growled in a rough voice as he stepped out into the path before Max. The sword he bore was short… and rusty. Two other men, even dirtier than the first, took flanking positions on either side of their leader. Unlike their chief, the supporting players carried stout wooden cudgels cut from tree limbs. Max guessed that there would be at least two men to his back. Three kilometers from the gateway camp, he’d heard the men following him for the past fifteen minutes and had been expecting a confrontation. He leaned heavily on his staff, glancing casually to his rear at the two large men with cudgels. He sighed to himself, thankful that there were no bowmen at his back.

  “I said, stand and deliver!” The leader repeated in a louder voice. “Your money or your…”

  The impact of Max’s staff on the side of the robber’s head disrupted his train of thought, and he slumped to the ground. The butt of the staff caught the man on the left in the solar plexus, leaving him gasping for breath on the ground, and a quick spin deprived the man on the right of consciousness. Max ran the last two down as they tried to escape, and two more lightning-quick strikes ended the confrontation. In the space of six human heartbeats, it was all over—the five highwaymen were down and unconscious. With no remorse, Max stripped them naked and, after he’d selected the best for himself, bound them all to a convenient tree with pieces of their own clothes. Their useless weapons, he threw off into the woods, and their money, he pocketed, along with the leader’s shiny ring. Finally, and regretfully, he stripped off his moderately clean clothes, folded them into his pack, and changed into the cleanest clothes the robbers had to offer. Looking more or less like a local, Max shouldered his pack, picked up his staff, and continued on.

  The sign on the road was unintelligible when he came up on it, and Max frowned. Viorela hadn’t taught him a runespell specifically for written translation. His finger traced a glowing rune in the air, and he spoke a word. The sign now read:

  South Brosthik

  15 mille passus

  The arrow beneath the sign pointed down the path, and Max blinked, thinking furiously. An ancient Roman measure of distance, fifteen mille passus was equal to twenty kilometers, more or less.

  The smell of woodsmoke was the first sign he was approaching people, if not civilization. After he saw the modest town from the top of a nearby hill, he still wondered if it qualified as civilization. At first, it looked like a lush wooded valley filled with huge mushrooms, their caps a riot of different colors. On second glance, he noted that the mushroom caps were simply the thatched and colored roofs of the various round buildings, all clustering under great leafy trees one hundred meters tall, the lowest branches thirty meters from the ground. Some of the smaller buildings were no more than a dozen meters in diameter and had thick overhanging eaves. Chimneys of gray stone poked through the thatched roofs at odd angles and trickled smoke into the still air. The largest building Max could see was set off several hundred meters from the rest of the residences and shops, and situated in the center of a wide clearing, it had three interconnected blue caps, each no less than forty meters in diameter. Every huge cap sported a half dozen tall stone chimneys, but strangely, and despite the definite chill in the air, not a single chimney smoked. Two of the round buildings set below the blue caps were three full stories, with tall narrow windows, and the last building only two stories, with fat round windows. As he watched from his place of concealment, a single person walked about the town in the gathering gloom, pausing at post after post to make a quick sharp gesture as he lit the streetlamps. Max gave a low chuckle. Even from his distance, he heard the raucous laughter as the door of a moderately large building swung open to let out a half dozen staggering patrons. Max smiled. That was his first stop.

  The sign swinging from rusted hooks over the front door proclaimed the establishment The Rusty Bucket, Inn and Tavern. The thatched cap roof might have been mauve at one time, and the exterior walls were a faded and dispirited brown—the same color as the local mud that clung to his boots. Max pulled open the door and was assaulted with a wave of noise and smells that nearly made him turn away. The large central room was vaulted and contained a central fireplace that was currently blazing brightly. Perhaps thirty people sat scattered about the room, eating from small wooden trays or drinking from foaming tankards while the blue smoke from their long-stemmed pipes curled toward the ceiling. The air smelled of cooked turnips and spilled beer, in equal proportions. He stepped in, reluctantly, and shut the door behind him. Not one person looked up to notice his arrival. He frowned. The innkeeper, however, took in his appearance from head to toe and was giving Max a hard glare. Max sighed, heading directly for the innkeeper.

  “Do you have a problem?” Max said in an even voice as he set his staff on the floor before him with a heavy thump.

  The chunky man in the white apron glowered at Max then at the newly acquired ring on Max’s right hand. “That ring belongs to my brother.” He rumbled, trying to sound threatening.

  “Belonged. Past tense. Your brother and his band of incompetents tri
ed to rob me. Instead, I robbed them and left them naked and tied to a tree just off the path between here and the gateway. If their teeth are sharper than their wits, they should be free by morning.”

  The stocky innkeeper seemed to deflate. “I told him this would happen.” He glanced at the ring again. “Can I buy that back from you?”

  Max studied the man. “How much?”

  The innkeeper bit his lip. “Ten dupondius, and not a penny more.”

  Max studied what was probably a three-carat ruby on the ring. “Five sestertius,” he replied, having already recalled what little he remembered of Roman coinage.

  “Are you insane?” the innkeeper shrieked.

  “Listen, pal,” Max hissed, leaning low over the counter. “You could add another wing onto this place for the price of this stone alone, and you know it. Although it’s worth an aureus or two, you will give me my five sestertius, three nights food and lodging, and be happy about it.” He held up the ring so that the lamplight caught the red gem, making it glitter in the lamplight.

  The innkeeper swallowed. “Three sestertius,” he muttered.

  Max put the ring back on his finger and began to turn away.

  “Fine… you win. Five sestertius and three days room and board, but I will need to get the money. I don’t have that much here.”

  Max smiled. “Fine,” he purred. “You get the ring when I get the money. I’d like to see my room now.”