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

by P. D. McClafferty

  The track was virtually empty of both people and animals, Max noted as they walked the hard-packed dirt road under a cerulean sky. Tall oaks and black walnut trees bordered the road, making the trail more like a long green tunnel through which they could occasionally glimpse the distant sky. Mérilla and Casey were out of sight, pulling point, while Xia and Moses came next and Max trailed the steady little tug, which was, in turn, following the transmitter he’d handed to Moses. The temperature was mild, with a gentle mid-spring feel, and birdcalls abounded from invisible residents in the sweet, jasmine-scented air. Max wished that he could shed both armor and the heavy chameleon suit shirt, but despite the beautiful weather, the countryside was still dangerous. Only an hour ago, they had found the body of a man nailed to a large tree with a black goblin arrow. Three hours had passed since the group left the ruined embassy, and to his best guess, they had another four hours of walking before they reached Bexley Landing. Unlike the buildings in South Brosthik and Peapend, the houses Max had seen tucked between the trees had been tall and narrow, with high, sharply pitched slate roofs. Unlike the earth-toned mushroom buildings, those in the forest were vibrant jewel tones in every color of the rainbow. They appeared to have been abandoned, their residents killed or driven out. For a world filled to overflowing with magic and beauty, Aeyaqar felt sad and defeated.

  A blinking yellow caret of an unknown contact in his HUD caught his eye, and Max stopped. Directly behind him, the contact was approaching quickly. A second yellow caret popped into existence beside the first.

  “Two unknown contacts on my six o’clock,” he said into the com. “Three hundred meters and closing quickly.” In the HUD, the blue caret labeled Chéng broke formation and headed back to him. And he smiled. “Noncombatants, take shelter in the trees to the right of the road. Moses, please park the tug somewhere out of harm’s way and then guard our rear until the point scouts return.”

  “Can do, boss.” The deep voice rumbled as the targets drew nearer.

  Max thought about it for a moment and turned the camouflage setting on his chameleon suit to solid brown. Retracting his helmet, he stepped to the side of the road but not into the woods. Xia, he motioned to the other side, where her active camouflage and lack of motion made her appear part of the surrounding woods. The HUD had told him that Mérilla and Casey would arrive momentarily. Unsnapping his holster, Max waited. The sound of footsteps grew louder before he saw the children turn the corner and start down the straightaway that led to the team. Max put the girl’s age at eight or nine, and the boy looked two or three years older. Their clothes were travel stained and torn and spoke of spending many nights sleeping under hedges. As they approached, Max could see that the children were stumbling with fatigue.

  “Nice day for a walk,” he said in a low, good-natured voice, stepping out onto the dirt road.

  The running pair staggered to a halt, the girl clutching the boy’s arm with a desperate strength, her hazel eyes wide. Both of the children’s faces were dirty and pale.

  “Brxx, tojjl zzznt?” the boy stammered.

  Max sighed, his finger tracing a silvery rune in the air. He nodded to the boy.

  “You’re a mage!” the boy gasped in an understandable language. “I saw the silver rune!”

  Max started. “You did? Well, how about that, and yes, I’m something like a mage. What are you running from?”

  “A gromadnyy!” the boy gulped. “And six goblins.”

  Max frowned again. “Shy, would you please join me with the children? I need a translator.” A camouflaged and armored figure moved out of the woods, looking remarkably like a golem of legend, and the little girl let out a small scream before Shyilia reached up to retract her helmet.

  “You’re an elf!” the boy gasped.

  Max squatted down to the child’s level. “Tell this woman what you are running from.”

  “A gromadnyy,” the boy repeated, “and six goblins.”

  “Gromadnyy?” Shy asked, her brows furrowing.

  “Gromadnyy,” the boy repeated firmly then rattled on too quickly for Max’s runespell to translate.

  Shy listened to the child, asked a question or two in the same language, and eventually turned back to Max, her face the color of chalk. “The boy tells me that there is a troll coming, along with its six goblin handlers. The boy says that this group, along with another larger group, but with no troll, have been pillaging the countryside unchecked. Nobody knows where the supreme governor’s soldiers have gone.”

  Max glared at the elfin woman. “You mentioned them once before. What the fuck is a troll?”

  Shy seemed to sag, until the armor was the only thing keeping her upright. “A troll is twice your size, Maximilian,” she said in a shaky voice. “Twice as tall, and twice the weight. Trolls are fast and have been known to run down deer and then eat them, hooves and all. Created by dark magic, trolls have a certain resistance to magical spells and are very hard to kill.” She frowned. “As a matter of fact, I don’t recall that anyone has ever killed a troll, although many have tried.”

  “What do they do, then?”

  “Run or die—usually, it’s run and die.” Turning to the boy, she shot him several quick questions, which the boy answered nervously, glancing all the while down the road from whence they’d come. Max noted that the woods about them had gotten ominously quiet. Shy turned back to Max. “The boy says the troll is less than two kilometers distant, and closing fast. If we were all to split up, it would only catch some of us,” she suggested tentatively.

  Max looked at the children then at Shy. “Take the children back with Moses and wait.” Activating his armor and helmet, he chinned the general com channel. “Set Dark Territory condition one. Attack is imminent… I say again—imminent.” On his HUD, seven red carets appeared, all moving in his direction. He and the team only had minutes. “Mérilla, if you can get to your long gun, the additional firepower would be appreciated. We have a troll to take out, and six goblins.”

  The com crackled, then Mérilla asked, “What’s a troll?”

  Max sighed before he continued. “Think twice as big as a goblin, mean as hell, and almost impossibel to kill. Xia, Moses, and Casey, concentrate on taking out the supporting goblins as soon as they come into range. I’ll work the troll until Mérilla can get into play to support me. Everyone… weapons free.”

  “Copy,” Moses said with his usual directness, echoed quickly by Mérilla and Casey.

  “If you survive this encounter, you and I are going to have a long talk about your personal safety, and your responsibility to others… namely me,” Xia snarled.

  With a low rumbling growl that shook the air around them and sounded uncomfortably like an approaching main battle tank, the troll turned the corner, and as soon as it saw Max, the troll began to run directly at him, quickly outdistancing the goblin handlers.

  Max’s brain turned to guacamole. His knees shook, and he’d never been so scared in his entire life. Standing better than three and a half meters tall and weighing, Max guessed, thirty-three stone, the beast was huge and ugly enough to make the goblins appear nondescript. Combining the purple of a deep bruise with booger green, the leathery skin of the beast appeared sewn together with crude stitches. Large brown eyes the size of teacups tended to wander independently of each other, and the nose was smashed, pushed over to the left side of the face, where it dripped a thin line of green snot down the purple cheek. Two chipped and yellowed fangs protruded up fifteen centimeters from the lower distended jaw. Drool dripped from the half-open mouth as it roared again. The barrel torso was surrounded by a cuirass of scarred plate armor, and the head sported a large metal bucket, the metal handle pulled down to serve the beast as a chin strap. The ragged sleeveless brown tunic the creature wore under the armor came to just below its surprisingly well-shaped and dimpled knees. The feet, the size of Bear P
aw snowshoes, were bare, and the monster carried a gnarled two-meter-long club in its right hand.

  “Now would be good,” Max said into the com as he raised his right hand, his other forming the runespell for the fireball. He shouted the word for fire, throwing the grapefruit-sized fireball with all his strength, just as three weapons crashed to his side and rear. The street before him exploded in a flash of blinding fire, and for a moment, Max blinked away tears, concentrating on seeing anything but spots of light in his temporarily flash-blinded eyes. The troll was down on its knees, but then, so was Max. The energy expenditure had been much more than he’d expected. Behind his back, weapons boomed and cracked, and the remaining goblins fell to the dusty road.

  In air that smelled strongly of burned meat, the troll looked up with its one good eye and growled. The right eye had literally boiled away in the socket and was dripping down the charred white cheekbone. The entire right side of the troll’s face had been burned away down to the bone, and the melted bucket sat askew on the smoldering face. The beast’s right fang had been burned off down to the jawbone. The remaining eye fixed on Max as the troll lurched to its feet and, with a roar, charged, swinging the club. A single deafening shot came from behind Max, and the troll stumbled to a halt, fingering the hole that had appeared in the center of the heavy cuirass. A second shot left Max’s ears ringing as another hole appeared in the troll’s cuirass, a finger’s width to the left of the first. With a last agonized groan, a torrent of dark-green blood gushed from the troll’s mouth, splattering the dusty road as the troll finally collapsed to its side and died, blood pooling in a thick green mass at its mouth.

  From his comfortable position on his knees, Max glanced up at Shyilia, giving her a weak smile. “I thought you said these critters were magic-proof.”

  Shy took him by one arm as Xia took him by the other, somehow managing to get him to his wobbly feet.

  “They are,” Shy admitted slowly. “Your fireball was so powerful that it blasted the magic barrier apart and severely wounded the troll in the process. Because that barrier also protected against physical injuries, when it dropped, it allowed your human weapon to administer the coup de grâce.”

  Max staggered to the tug, where he sat heavily, panting from the effort of walking the short distance. “What’s wrong with me?” he whispered to Shy.

  Her look was both compassionate and angry. “As Oewaelle told you so long ago, you only have so much energy available to you as a vampire. Expend too much, and you will die. You came within a hair’s breadth of crossing that line.”

  Max shrugged her comment away; he was too tired to care at the moment.

  Shy shot Xia a pleading look, but Mérilla, who had just finished packing the long gun back into its travel case, spoke up as she grinned at Max.

  “I’ll volunteer to donate this time.” She pulled her long red hair away from her collar and calmly unbuttoned her shirt.

  Xia touched the woman’s shoulder and, smiling, shook her head. “My job.” Her tone, as soft as it was, brooked no argument.

  Mérilla looked from Max to Xia, a slow smile touching her lips. “So, it’s that way, eh?”

  “Oui,” Xia replied, calmly unbuttoning her own shirt.

  “Don’t I have any say in the matter?” Max asked in a weary voice.

  “No!” the two women replied as one.

  Xia sat on the tug beside Max as Shy and Mérilla hustled the others a discreet distance away.

  Max, pulling back a little, looked Xia in the eye. “I don’t like the idea of ‘feeding’ on you, Xia.”

  “You do your best to keep us all alive, Maximilian. I’m doing my best to keep you alive too, if for slightly different and more personal reasons.” Xia touched his face gently.

  As he shut his eyes, Xia placed her fingers behind his head, gently guiding him to her bare shoulder. It had been a long day, fraught with danger, and the scent that wafted from Xia’s open shirt was much more woman than perfume. It acted on him like an aphrodisiac. Nibbling her earlobe gently, he worked his way down to her soft shoulder, where he paused to lick the salty skin. Xia’s hand tightened on the back of his neck, and she moaned deep in her throat. When he glanced briefly at her face, her eyes were closed, a hint of a sensual smile on her lips. He licked again as his fangs distended… and bit. Her small shriek of pleasure was muffled by her face buried in his shoulder, and Max could hear her panting as her heart pounded. His head spun, and he struggled to pull away, knowing he’d consumed one third of a liter of Xia’s sweet blood.

  She was pressed against him, arms and legs wrapped tightly around him as they lay on the ground beside the tug. He could feel her heartbeat slowing, her panting breaths becoming more normal. Her body still trembled as she clung to him, and from past experience, years past, in fact, he knew that she was experiencing orgasm after wracking orgasm. Finally, the trembling and shudders subsided, and Xia looked up at him.

  “The last time we did this, I thought I’d hit the pinnacle of eroticism.” She laid her head on his chest. “I’m happy to say I was wrong.” She sighed in contentment. “Very, very wrong.” She was silent for several long moments. “I think, if we were ever able to measure it, that in the give and take of blood transfer, you are giving almost as much as you are getting. Instead of feeling drained, I feel… good.”

  He leaned over and kissed her gently. “The others are probably waiting for us to… finish, and we still have a long way to go.”

  Xia let out a long, disappointed sigh. “Spoilsport.”

  Chapter 11

  THE FINAL OPERATION – PLAN A

  Moses and Casey were both chuckling when Max and Xia finally got to their feet, while both Shy and Mérilla had wistful, slightly pensive looks.

  Xia grinned as she approached Mérilla. “See why I said it was my job?” Without really meaning to, she blushed slightly.

  “I see,” Mérilla replied, returning a smile.

  “So,” Max began, looking around the bemused group, “ready to go?”

  Moses looked down then picked up the two empty MRE packets the children had discarded after wolfing the contents. “Ready, boss.”

  “Since I was… busy, has anyone figured out what to do with the kids?” Max glanced at the two laughing youngsters, whom Wynn was keeping entertained with a funny story that involved much arm waving. “Do they have family?”

  Shy gave him a long look. “The troll got them.”

  “Damn.” Max scratched his beard. “Do you remember the innkeeper in Peapend? Older widow and empty nester?”

  The elfin woman nodded.

  “I think she might enjoy a little company.” He crooked a finger to the children. “Come on, kids. I’m going to introduce you to my aunt Aneshka, who just happens to live in Peapend. We’re going to travel by magical gateway.”

  “Really?” the boy and girl exclaimed as one.

  “Yup. Now that I can do it without killing myself.” He winked at Shy. “I’d like you to come along. It will look much better with both of us accompanying the children.”

  The gray-haired innkeeper blinked in surprise as the four travelers calmly stepped out of her closed pantry and into the warm and cheery great room. Max had seen the wide seldom-used storeroom once and had thought it an ideal place to locate his momentary gateway—well away from prying eyes.

  “Hello, Aneshka.” Max said, smiling. “It’s good to see you again. How’s business?”

  The innkeeper sighed, although she kept casting curious looks at the children and Shyilia. “Not so good. With the troubles, people aren’t traveling like they used to, and the bills keep piling up. I even had to let one of the serving girls go.”

  Max nodded and lowered his voice. “These are my nephew and niece,” he said, inventing the story whole cloth as he went along. “They lived a few hundred leagues west of
here until the goblins came and killed their folks. My business is taking me in harm’s way, and I don’t dare bring children. I was hoping you might look after them for a bit, until I get back.”

  The woman hesitated, watching the wide-eyed children.

  “This will help cover their room and board and education.” Max set two golden aureus down on the counter in front of the innkeeper, who looked at them as if they might bite her.

  “I could build a new wing on this place with that, or raise fifty children.”

  Max smiled. “Or you could manage to stay in business while all the others are closing down and have enough left over to help me with these two children.”

  The innkeeper rolled her eyes, making the coins vanish from the countertop. “I would have taken the children in anyway, my lord. Congratulations, you are now part owner of the Sleeping Cat Inn. What name shall I register it under?”

  “Maximilian Arkady Kiritescu.” Max said in an emotionless voice.

  “Kiritescu.” The innkeeper frowned. “I seem to remember stories of an Earl of Wraniel by that name, from a long time ago.”

  Max’s smile was crooked. “That would have been my great grandfather, who is long dead, along with my grandparents and parents.”

  The innkeeper’s eyes widened as she realized what he was implying. “And who are the children, really?” she whispered.

  “Orphans,” Max relented. “I saved them from the troll that killed their family.” Max bit his lip, thinking furiously. “Tell people that these two are the children of a duke who survived in hiding all these years, passing the title down in secret. The duke and his entire family, except these two, were killed by a troll and a goblin pack while visiting the elfin embassy in Jagatika province.”

  “But… why?”