01 - Underworld

by Greg Cox

  Could it be true? Was there actually a chance? In theory, Michael’s blood possessed the unique ability to absorb both lycan and vampiric attributes, but was she willing to risk poisoning Michael further, on the word of a lycanthropic mad scientist? Uncertainty flooded her face, and she stared anxiously at Lucian, who implored her urgently.

  “Do it… it’s the only way to save his life.”

  A bittersweet smile manifested itself on Lucian’s stricken features as Selene nodded and turned back toward Michael. Only a few centimeters away, likewise sprawled on the gritty cement floor, Kraven winced mightily as he pried the broken blade out of his skewered leg. His pain-filled eyes blinked in surprise as he saw Selene dip her lips toward Michael’s bare neck.

  Surrendering to a profound longing she had not dared to acknowledge before, not even to herself, Selene opened her mouth wide and sank her fangs deeply into Michael’s throat.

  Yes! she thought ecstatically. At last!

  “What the hell are you doing?” Kraven yelled at Selene. The horrified outrage in his voice was music to Lucian’s ears.

  “You may have murdered me, cousin,” the lycan taunted Kraven with his dying breath, “but my will is done regardless.”

  If only Viktor could be here to share this moment as well, Lucian mused. His war finally over, he sagged limply upon the floor. He could feel the deadly silver nitrate completing its malignant work. His broken heart burned like a thing afire. Thin tendrils of yellow smoke rose from his lips and nostrils as his internal organs combusted volcanically.

  The hour is come, my love, he thought, at peace despite the blazing pain consuming him. In his mind’s eye, he could see the radiant face of the incandescent vampire princess who had won his heart so many centuries ago. You need wait for me no longer. We will be together again.

  Not content to let Lucian die of silver poisoning, Kraven snatched up the silver nitrate gun from where it had fallen and leveled it at Lucian.

  Blam!

  Lucian, champion of the lycanthropes, was dead. This time for certain.

  Michael’s hot blood coursed down her throat. Even tainted with silver nitrate, which was entirely harmless to her, the taste of him inflamed her senses. Her lips pressed tightly against his jugular while her tongue lapped at the crimson stream leaking from his neck. She sank her fangs into his flesh as deeply as she could, fighting the temptation to suck every last drop of his blood from his body.

  By the Ancestors! she thrilled, finally understanding what it truly meant to be a vampire. I never knew it could be like this!

  She had to remind herself that the idea was not to drain Michael but to infect him with the vampiric strain of the original mutation. Reluctantly, she withdrew her fangs and looked down at Michael anxiously. Was that enough? she worried. She had never tried to change a mortal before, let alone a lycan. Have I saved him or ensured his death?

  Before she had a chance to find out, a powerful hand grabbed her by the collar and yanked her away from Michael. A second later, that same hand threw her forcefully into the nearby generator, so that she smashed into the bulky steel mechanism before tumbling to the floor. The steady thrum of the generator was joined by the sudden ringing in her ears.

  “Where is he?” Viktor demanded. “Where is Kraven?”

  The Elder stood over her, clad in the forbidding raiment of a medieval warlord. An enormous sword was sheathed at his side, while three undead bodyguards blocked the exit.

  Conditioned to obey Viktor, despite everything she had just learned, Selene searched the chamber for Kraven, but the wily ex-regent was nowhere to be seen. Only a broken shard of Lucian’s blade lay on the floor where Kraven had been moments before. Damn him! Selene fumed, realizing that Kraven must have slipped away while she was biting Michael. That lying bastard’s got more lives than a cat!

  Viktor’s merciless eyes scanned the compartment as well. His saturnine expression darkened as he saw for himself that Kraven was missing. Scowling, he turned his attention to Michael instead. The moribund American was still lying helplessly on the floor, his eyes rolled up in their sockets. Silver nitrate leaked from the bullet wounds in his chest, and his limbs jerked spastically. The mark of Selene’s crimson kiss glistened wetly on the young man’s throat.

  Viktor glared at the bite wound for a long moment. Then he turned and locked eyes with Selene. A look of extreme disappointment curled his patrician lips. His saddened gaze made it crystal clear that, to his mind, she had failed him again.

  “Very well,” he stated mournfully. “I’ll do it myself.”

  He stepped toward Michael, reptilian eyes burning with lethal intent. Lost in his private battle against the toxic silver ravaging his system, Michael made no effort to save himself, was not even aware of the danger.

  “No!” Selene cried out. She sprang forward to stop Viktor, but the mighty Elder knocked her aside with a Herculean blow that sent her flying across the generator room into the opposite wall. The chipped and flaking brickwork grazed her forehead, causing blood to trickle down her face. Dazed, she crumpled to the floor.

  Hissing like a serpent, Viktor grabbed Michael by the throat and swiped him off the floor with a single hand. Fangs bared, the Elder savagely slammed Michael against the brick wall separating the generator room from the central chamber. Bones snapped and concrete crumbled as, with one smooth movement, Viktor shoved Michael all the way through the dilapidated wall, creating a jagged hole that looked out over the rain-filled bunker.

  Selene watched in dismay as Michael, along with an avalanche of broken concrete, plummeted through the gap, falling five meters to the flooded floor below. She heard him land with a splash—and a sickening, bone-crunching thud.

  Viktor smiled and wiped his hands together, as though finished with a mildly unpleasant chore. He turned back toward Selene, his eyes still vibrant with hatred. The shaken vampiress cringed as he stepped toward her. She glared at him, deeply hurt, like a blameless child who has been struck out of hand by a drunken parent. Viktor halted, taken aback by the betrayed expression on her face and the rivulets of blood coursing down her cheek. His own features softened and the fury slowly departed his gaze.

  “Forgive me, child,” he murmured. He held out his hand, intending to gently stroke her forehead, but she flinched from his touch.

  Selene recalled everything she had learned down here in the underworld. She stared back at him defiantly.

  “It wasn’t the lycans!” she accused him. “It was you!”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Although nearly comatose, Michael felt the tremendous jolt of his crash landing on the floor of the bunker. The jarring impact knocked the breath from his laboring lungs and sent shock waves racing through his entire body. He splashed down into an oily puddle, landing flat on his back. Half submerged in the greasy water, he vaguely registered his new surroundings, even as another wave of cataclysmic tremors shook his body.

  His blood fizzed and fermented in his veins and arteries. Shattered bones shifted and warped as though possessed by demons. A peculiar throbbing sensation raced from the stinging bite marks on his neck to the inner depths of his broken body. The injured wolf inside his brain howled louder than the explosions and gunfire echoing through the endless artificial caverns. He felt the Change beginning.

  Yet, over the din, he still could hear Selene’s voice crying out somewhere high above him. “It wasn’t the lycans!” she shouted angrily at an unknown foe, perhaps the same one who had just hurled Michael through the solid brick wall. “It was you!”

  Despite the pain and trauma of his transformation, Michael’s soul responded to the woman’s voice. His beleaguered awareness, lost in the primal heart of darkness, crawled fitfully up toward the light.

  Selene!

  Fluttering eyelids peeled open. Inhuman eyes glowed cobalt blue.

  “This is all because of you!” she accused Viktor.

  For the first time in ages, a look of discomfort, perhaps even of guilt, passed ov
er the Elder’s face. He turned hastily toward his Death Dealer escorts. “Leave us!”

  The obedient vampires promptly withdrew, closing the door behind them. Selene found herself alone with her immortal sire.

  She climbed to her feet and faced him, unafraid. Michael was gone, thrown to his death before her very eyes, so what else did she have to fear? “What are you going to do?” she challenged him harshly. “Kill me, like you did my family?” Centuries of misplaced anger infused her voice with ringing fervor. “How could you bear my trust, knowing that you murdered my family?”

  Viktor stepped forward, his eyes filled with sympathy. “Yes, I’ve taken from you,” he confessed. “I’ve hurt you. But I’ve given so much more. Is it not a fair trade for the life I’ve granted you? The gift of immortality?”

  The shock of his damning admission washed over Selene like a bitter tide. “And the life of your daughter?” she challenged him. “Your own flesh and blood?”

  Her words struck Viktor with greater force than any werewolf’s slashing claws. Pain deepened the somber lines of his face as he looked dolefully at Lucian’s corpse, lying prostrate upon the floor. The Elder crouched down beside his ancient adversary and tugged the metallic pendant from Lucian’s neck.

  Selene almost felt sorry for him.

  The Change gripped Michael again, just as it had in the back of the police car a few hours ago. His body writhed and contorted in a series of shock-inducing paroxysms that tore his soggy garments into ribbons. Fractured bones re-knit themselves in new configurations. Protean skin and muscle expanded, gaining mass and density at superhuman speed. Glossy black hair sprouted from Michael’s pulsating hide as fangs jutted sharply from his gums. Barbed claws extended from his fingertips, scratching senselessly at the rocky floor beneath the freezing water. His spine stretched and twisted, and he felt his entire body morphing into the primitive shape of an animal. The howl of his inner beast drowned out the world.

  Viktor rose slowly from the dead lycan’s side. He gazed down at the gleaming pendant resting in the palm of his hand. Ancient regrets, buried for centuries, surfaced in his pain-filled eyes and voice.

  “I loved my daughter,” he declared, “but the abomination growing in her womb was a betrayal to me and the entire coven.” He glanced vengefully at Lucian’s corpse, his scorching eyes all but incinerating the lifeless remains of his daughter’s lover. “I had no choice.”

  Selene backed away from Viktor, suspecting that she might soon be joining Sonja and Lucian in the afterlife.

  Michael Corvin was gone. In his place, a full-blooded werewolf lay sprawled on the floor of the bunker. The falling rain baptized the newborn monster, initiating him into a new and fundamentally altered existence.

  But the transformation was not complete.

  The lupine monster spasmed explosively, arching his back in agony. His hairy limbs splashed against the iridescent surface of the puddle, sending sprays of oily water flying in all directions. An anguished roar erupted from the creature’s powerful jaws as the Change began to regress, taking Michael back through the singular genetic mutations behind the evolution of both vampires and werewolves.

  The disembodied howl within his skull was joined by the flapping of invisible leather wings. Michael screamed through mutating vocal cords as he suffered the cataclysmic birth pangs of a brand new life form.

  Viktor’s eyes were moist, but his voice was cold.

  “I did what I had to do to protect our species,” he said without remorse. “As I am forced to do yet again.”

  He unsheathed his sword, which was stained with freshly spilled blood, and advanced toward Selene—until a bloodcurdling wail came from the bunker outside. The eerie cry rose from the floor of the central chamber, many meters below the generator room.

  Michael? Selene wondered, afraid to let herself hope that he was still alive. She listened to the bizarre wail in puzzlement. The tortured keening didn’t sound human—or lycan.

  Is that you?

  Sword in hand, Viktor whirled toward the ragged crack in the wall. He peered through the gap at the inundated floor below. His brow wrinkled in confusion.

  Michael Corvin was gone.

  He turned back toward Selene, intending to extract from her the likely whereabouts of her lycan paramour. Corvin will die by my hand before this night is through, he vowed solemnly. It had taken six centuries for Viktor’s vengeance to catch up with Lucian; he did not intend to wait that long again.

  “Where—” He began his interrogation, only to be caught off guard by a roundhouse kick to his chin, delivered with extreme vigor by Selene herself. His head jerked sideways, and his bloody sword escaped from his fingers, flying out through the gap in the wall. He heard it land with a splash on the floor of the chamber below.

  His temper flared murderously. You dare strike your sire? he railed silently at Selene. So be it. The treasonous slut had signed her own death warrant. He would not wait to capture her lover before consigning Selene to oblivion. I should have killed you with the rest of your insipid family years ago!

  Turning his gaze ahead once more, he expected to see Selene putting up some futile show of resistance. Instead, he got the shock of his immortal existence as he found himself face-to-face with…

  What? The uncanny creature standing before him, defending Selene from his approach, was like nothing Viktor had ever seen before. Not quite vampire, not quite werewolf, but something uniquely in between. Striking in appearance, the hybrid immortal looked more human than beast and more demon than human.

  Jet-black eyes gleamed like quicksilver. An iridescent, metallic sheen added luster to his rippling flesh, giving him the look of a classical sculpture brought to life. His hairless chest gleamed beneath the flickering lights, while his soggy trousers preserved a modicum of decency. Although his handsome features were essentially human once more, sharpened teeth and nails betrayed his predatory nature.

  “Michael?” Selene whispered in awe.

  Viktor had only an instant to react to the unnerving sight of the hybrid creature and to marvel at the preternatural speed at which Corvin had returned to the generator room. Then Michael’s clenched fist slammed into Viktor’s chest with the force of a wrecking ball, driving the Elder’s silver medallion into his chest and sending Viktor through what was left of the crumbling brick wall.

  He fell fifteen feet before crashing into the muddy floor of the main chamber. His momentum sent him tumbling through the filthy muck until he smacked into a pair of unmoving, adamantine legs. He looked up in stunned amazement to see Michael Corvin staring down at him with his unearthly black eyes. What? he thought, flabbergasted. How the devil did he get down here so quickly?

  He hurriedly rolled in the opposite direction and scrambled to his feet but once again found Michael standing directly in front of him. The hybrid’s speed was astounding even by immortal standards. Viktor suddenly felt something he hadn’t experienced in untold centuries: fear.

  But he declined to let his fear undo him. No mongrel freak will make me yield, he resolved, girding himself for the battle to come. He faced off against Michael beneath the cascading rain. My blood is pure. My will is supreme!

  They circled each other menacingly, searching for an opening, clawed hands poised to strike. Viktor’s reptilian white eyes contrasted sharply with Michael’s roiling black orbs. Two sets of pearly fangs gnashed in primal warning.

  As if responding to some subliminal signal, they surged toward each other simultaneously. The past collided with the future as the Elder vampire and the newly created hybrid smashed together with stupendous force, sending seismic vibrations throughout the underworld. They traded colossal blows, hammering each other like warring gods.

  The entire bunker trembled.

  The earth-shaking jolts brought every other conflict to a halt. All around the vast subterranean complex, vampires, werewolves, and lycans stopped fighting as the epic clash commanded their rapt attention. Equally spellbound, they flocked to t
he catwalks and subway tracks overlooking the arenalike central chamber, jostling for a better view of the battle royal going on below. Even the dimmest and most bloodthirsty spectator realized that the history of his shadowy, secret world was being rewritten before his very eyes.

  Michael had never felt so powerful, so unstoppable. Superhuman strength and energy throbbed in his transformed muscles and sinews, while his every sense was ten times keener than ever before. All his fear and confusion were things of the past. Michael didn’t know exactly what it was that he had become, thanks to Selene’s miraculous kiss, but he knew that he was now something infinitely more majestic than just a simple American medical student.

  Bring on the vamps and wolves! He exulted, reveling in his new-found courage and vitality. I’m not afraid anymore.

  He recognized Viktor from Lucian’s memories, and his firsthand experience of Lucian and Sonja’s tragic saga only heightened his desire to destroy the pitiless vampire tyrant, besides the fact that Viktor had tried to kill both him and Selene. He slashed at the Elder with his taloned hands and snarled at his enemy through clenched white fangs. In his heart, he knew that he was stronger than any mere vampire.

  But Viktor had centuries of battle experience to draw upon. In a stealthy move, he caught Michael by surprise by dropping down and swiping Michael’s legs out from under him. It took only a split second, and the next thing Michael knew, he was flat on his back with Viktor hammering him from above.

  The vampire’s naked fists fell like a meteor storm against Michael’s face and stomach. His body shuddered before the blows, and his skull rang like the interior of an enormous cathedral bell. His vision dimmed as he felt himself blacking out.

  Like every other soul in the underworld, Selene watched the fierce contest with both wonder and apprehension. She peered down through the shattered wall at the titanic battle between Viktor and Michael, knowing that her own immortal existence depended on the outcome.